Not that I use them anymore anyway, cancelling my old account, but name and shame any companies who conveniently can't support their free base. Also - it's VNC. It's a protocol. There's a dozen free clients out there.
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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I use anydesk for a single pc2pc connection and lately it's been popping up with a 60 second ad saying like "we're glad you are using it and you should start paying for a business license." I use it about once every couple weeks. Like I'm not paying for your shit for a few times a month use.
This was the catalyst I needed to switch to self hosting rustdesk. It was a bit of a pain setting up, but people comfortable with cli would handle it much better than I did.
This looks nice, but stupid they put things like ldap behind a paywall when every other service includes it for free.
Every other service: "oh yeah, oops" scratches that feature off the free plan
You: "no wait not like that"
It's just weird that it's... half open source and half not. Other services are simply open source. I don't know why they bother having the free one be open source if half of the code is paywalled
Developers also need to make money to live and survive. Why do you think you're entitled to all of their work for free? If it's such an inconvenience, you should try your hand at coding an alternative and giving all of it for free. We're waiting.
I am a developer, you're right. I think I'll fork it and add my own ldap auth in. Good chance to learn Rust.
I don't like it because that's exactly how things like this RealVNC thing happen. These companies all start with good will, we have a free tier, we are open source, we love the community. Then one day they snap it all back, say "Hey we never said it'd be forever, did you look in subsection 6 of section 42? It said in there that your license wasn't a license and now you need to pay up" So yeah, especially in context of RealVNC I'm real jaded against "good will companies".
You want to charge for your product? Super, do so. Don't lie and say you're doing good and then rip it out later. Gitea is a good example of that.
I use teamviewer to access a relative's computer when she needs help, and it's the same nagware. Like okay, I understand there are cloud costs. But where exactly are they here? I am a row in a database, you store my credentials and probably a couple of keys. All data is between the host computer and me, there's no processing of any kind there. Why exactly should I pay you monthly? There's no value benefit.
Convenience (after you install it, all you have to do is enter the code and you're connected, no other setup required), familiarity (it's the default name people will think of or find if they want remote access - that alone means they can get away with pushing their users slightly more) and - IMHO most importantly - connectivity: if two computers can connect to the TeamViewer servers, they will be able to connect to each other.
That's huge in the world of broken Internet where peer to peer networking feels like rocket science - pretty much every consumer device will be sitting behind a NAT, which means "just connecting" is not possible. You can set up port forwarding (either manually or automatically using UPnP, which is its own bag of problems), or you can use IPv6 (which appears to be currently available to roughly 40% users globally; to use it, both sides need to have functional IPv6), or you can try various NAT traversal techniques (which only work with certain kinds of NAT and always require a coordinating server to pull off - this is one of the functions provided by TeamViewer servers). Oh, and if you're behind CGNAT (a kind of NAT used by internet providers; apparently it's moderately common), then neither port forwarding or NAT traversal are possible. So if both sides are behind CGNAT and at least one doesn't have IPv6, establishing a direct link is impossible.
With a relay server (like TeamViewer provides), you don't have to worry about being unable to connect - it will try to get you a direct link, but if that fails, it will just act as a tunnel and pass the data between both devices.
Sure, you can self host all this, but that takes time and effort to do right. And if your ISP happens to use CGNAT, that means renting a VPS because you can't host it at home. With TeamViewer, you're paying for someone else to worry about all that (and pay for the servers that coordinate NAT traversal and relay data, and their internet bandwidth, neither of which is free).
Tailscale is piss easy to install and set up and works just fine for making a direct link from a CGNATed connection.
Right, now get a borderline computer-illiterate person to connect to your network, ensure their firewall isn't misconfigured to block all incoming traffic (with TeamViewer, this configuration would still work because the device just connects to the TV server) and open and set up a completely separate screen sharing program.
I know none of these steps are difficult if you have any idea what you're doing, but I've met plenty of people who would most likely need assistance going through the motions. Funnily enough, the best way to do it remotely would probably be to get them to install TeamViewer to then set this up for them remotely.
By the way, as far as networking goes, Tailscale does the same thing TeamViewer does, just for a VPN instead of a screen sharing application - it will try to do all the NAT punchthrough techniques and IPv6 connection and fall back on tunneling through relay servers if all else fails. It's not any more of a direct connection than TV.
Our company pays for TeamViewer, and I still get nagged all the time, so there's no point in giving them money, they still nag you all the time.
that's actually really good to know
I had that happen for a while too, somehow it thought I was using it too much or something that wasn't for personal use. You can request a whitelist if you are so inclined. The process was pretty simple: https://anydesk.com/en/whitelist-request
After I did that I haven't seen that pop back up in over a year.