AnyDesk alternatives: accessing remote systems over different networks

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Hi folks,

I use AnyDesk at the moment to access my home system from work and vice versa. I’m happily on Gnome and would not like to switch desktop environments because I quite like it and the keyboard-centric workflow works for me. However AnyDesk requires X11 to function:

and GDM is dropping support for X sessions from F42:

So, I need to find an alternative to AnyDesk. I’m happy with just having shell access too. Any ideas please?

Note: my work and home machines are on two different networks, and the work (university) network does not expose the IP of my workstation publicly. I also do not have admin rights at work, so I cannot set up things like port-forwarding etc. (So, even if I am in the university VPN, I cannot access my workstation because one does not know what IP to use for it, or I haven’t figured out what it is.)

AnyDesk worked well because one didn’t have to tinker with network settings, since it seems to go through some AnyDesk infrastructure. Is there a way of using RDP etc. in the same way? I’m happy to buy a cheap virtual host to set something up myself if that’ll allow this.

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I have not used it, but I have seen NoMachine being recommended several times and they apparently support Wayland.

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I recommend these options:

  • Setting up own VPN on a VPS, preferably using WireGuard - ~$3-5/month.
  • Overlay mesh networking with Yggdrasil - $0 cost, free and open source solution, has RPM repo/packages, best option in its class.
  • Cloudflare Zero Trust with WARP client - $0 cost, proprietary solution, has RPM repo/packages, can also provide client IPv6 connectivity to the Internet for IPv4-only hosts.
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There is also Chrome Remote Desktop. While not FOSS, it’s easy to set up and use. Haven’t used it for accessing Fedora machines, but apparently should work on Linux too as a Chrome extension.

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