this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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Howdy Selfhosters!

A family member who does not live in my state recently got a new PC, and asked for my help in setting it up. Since it can't be done in person, I'll have to do this over the phone. Problem is, I don't really want to walk them through all of the steps (download Firefox, ublock origin, uninstall W11 bloat, etc) over the phone. I was hoping there exists a software that I could host on my Linux machine (I am able to port forward/host externally if necessary), and instruct them over the phone to download the "other end" (client-side) of the software so that I can remote in and set their PC up myself.

I checked out the awesome-selfhosted list and found that most of the remote access softwares are mainly for SSH servers. I did check out Guacamole, but I'm not sure I understand how to utilize the software. Any help and suggestions are welcome. Thank you everyone!

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[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's open source, and the relay's are e2ee (and audited), but they can also be self hosted.

  1. Do you have actual technical issues with rustdesk?

  2. Do you have an alternative software you would recommend? I hate when people spread FUD or say "don't use/do this" without actually providing an alternative. Drives me nuts. Because if you don't present an alternative to a software that someone needs, your complaints are kinda meaningless and a waste of everybody's time because they're gonna end up ignoring the complaints and using the tool they need.

[–] Hotzmon@fedinsfw.app 0 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

RustDesk is not fully open source, there are closed source parts for it.

Currently there is no good alternative unfortunately.

[–] ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago

If you aren't a fan of RustDesk, one alternative that I've used a bit is Remotely (https://github.com/immense/Remotely). Me and a few people were using it but most of them went to RustDesk.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 17 hours ago

Lmao stop spreading more FUD. They have a paid, proprietary web UI to make management and administration easy. But you can get all the critical components needed to actually run the software from the source.