Linux was hard and that was true at some point though. I remember having to build kernels for Debian in order to have support for my motherboard, not sure what was the main issue there, but I had a hard time compiling them until they worked, this could be a couple days worth of trial and error…

That’s history. Still, it is not some rumour as you put it.

Thanks for the additional digging.

Is it totally open source? Because I am not suited to verify this - I can only see that at some point it was not open source while claiming to be, and relied on binary blobs. Their server side code? Cannot know what is in there (of course). Running your own server? Cannot really vet the code either, so until it becomes still more popular I cannot trust it yet.

I mean, it is probably fine, I hope it is.

They have scrubbed Zhou from the company info page. They were listed as founder before among the two other people (who may or may not be real - this is another question mark I saw). This scrubbing could, of course be non nefarious. But I think this could have and should have been communicated better.

But instead they seem to shut down discussion: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/1159#discussioncomment-3312105

None of this has to mean anything much but I personally will continue with paid options still for now and keep hoping rd would turn out alright!

Chinese company profile

https://tracxn.com/d/companies/rustdesk/__hVv0PUAcFB2LfybEPDvvPkJf14Mc7PfmkSGfqXkYxsg

News piece about them

https://inf.news/en/tech/b99963560cecae8e1dfe347c68e36ff8.html

None of this means much else than that I will not use it myself, at least yet. I don’t trust it

One example of criticism

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/community_consensus_on_rustdesk_with_all_the/

It doesn’t need to be, I just won’t go near it if they communicate like this and do stuff like change their users’ system settings without prompting. You can do a search for rustdesk controversy and have a look yourself. Just looking at how they hide the company’s chinese origins and their communication style when they are asked for clarification… That’s enough for me. Everyone should be paranoid when installing apps, and this is for remote control, no less.

Edit 2: see also their claims of open source while people could not compile a working version without a pre compiled binary blob. Maybe they fixed that? Or not?

Edit: I want to add, I want an open source software like that, I hope they would turn up good. Just going to watch from over here.

It seems they were trying to hide the app being Chinese, added a trusted certificate on your machine without prompting, complaints about not really being open source, etc. It doesn’t look very good to me at this point.

Search around a bit and you will find these issues being raised by people, at the same time the answers fron the team seem very dismissive and amount to “please no politics here”.

Check the wikipedia page edits as well, weird stuff. I don’t like weird stuff when choosing a remote control software.

Rather paying Anydesk than using this. At this point at least.

Edit: to add, rustdesk was using and sending data to a chinese server for some reason. At least they got an EU one instead, at least according to wikipedia, but that could just resend whatever data forward. This is all just what I see on the net though. But, enough for me to choose something else.

I would not touch it, seems very sketchy, and with this sort of program you need total trust

This is the way to go!

X is not a good look, it is ******* cringe to see governmental entities still using it around the world.

Use duplicati, or if you want command line, use borg.