One of the problems with having switched over a number of relatives to Linux is that I’m “the guy” when they have issues, and I can’t always get over to help them in a timely manner. A lot of the time most stuff is working just fine and it’s just a matter of popping into the desktop and fixing a bad link or a naughty plugin that’s slipped into Chrome etc, but it DOES require being able to see what they see.
Windows has a system where you can “request assistance” and then provide a code for access at which point it shares your desktop. There are similar systems where one can get a link in email and click it for support.
I’d like to find a system that I can host myself to allow users to queue up for support at which point I can pop into their system, without needing to open ports on their routers or using something hackish like forwarding a VNC port to an SSH server etc
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk is apparently good. Server part can be installed with Yunohost. Android app available on F-Droid.
RustDesk is FOSS, written in Rust and can be selfhosted.
RustDesk is pretty simple and has a fairly friendly interface. I’m hoping they bring back the play store installer though since getting relatives to install from an APK wouldn’t be much fun
You can get it from F-Droid
It’s so fast too. It’s my default for supporting my family computers across the country.
It’s very fast and decodes in my GPU (Ryzen 7040u)
I use https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral
For this usecase. This also lets me do things like run admin cmd commands. It should be noted, however, that the Windows UAC prompt won’t show up in a VNC session by default, you either need to configure UAC, or set up RDP.
Been using it for years at work. Really awesome piece of free software.
Yeah the UAC issue happens with a lot of stuff, including (last time I checked) screen-shares with Teams
i did use meshcentral before which did work quiet well.
I tried that one as well recently. It seems decent but the Android client is a tad broken (crashes on screen share).
Rustdesk?
Yup. Literally just set up a VM with that one last night to test out since a bunch here have recommended it
