Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #58 for this comm, first seen 4th Feb 2026, 01:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Sunshine and Moonlight.

It is made for gaming, but can be used for remote desktop. I use it when my laptop cannot handle a Blender scene and I want to use my desktop. It also works good with Headscale (or Tailscale if you use that). You can enable end to end encryption too.

If you want a direct replacement for Anydesk, check out Rustdesk. It is FOSS, but does not have good reputation.

Another vote for Rustdesk

I use it mostly for family tech support where MY PC is running Linux and THEY are on Windows though it works great in both directions

I initially misread your question as "What good is remote desktop software?" and I thought, "look at this person, humble bragging that they are fit enough to occasionally walk across the room.

I guess now I need to go exercise.

Nomachine

Sunshine and moonlight. Or just ssh if it's for administrative tasks.

I've had good experiences with Rustdesk. The client is open-source and the no-cost server components (ID and Relay servers) are self-hostable. The remote server works on X11 and Windows. I use this script to run XFCE+Rustdesk in a headless session:

export SERVERNUM=69
export SCREEN_SIZE='-screen 0 2560x1440x24'
export DISPLAY=":${SERVERNUM}"
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11

xvfb-run --server-num="${SERVERNUM}" --server-args "${SCREEN_SIZE}" startxfce4 & disown
sleep 1
flatpak run com.rustdesk.RustDesk & disown

Sunshine + Moonlight is also a good choice. I have Sunshine installed on a box at home and use Tailscale to connect to it from the Moonlight client. At 1440p 60 FPS it has no visible compression artifacts and responsive enough for gaming.

Install Tailscale on all devices.

Then ssh into whatever you need.

If you need desktop remote access the Windows RDP should work for Windows to Windows machines.

For Linux host to Windows client I've had good experiences with Remmina Desktop.

You sure you can't do what you need from bash/ssh?

If you only need ssh, anything can be terminal as everything has a ssh client.

vnc

Depends exactly what you're doing on that old PC.

If you just need to connect for administration and the like, VNC is decent. It's my default.

If you want to watch videos or the like, I'd definitely suggest Sunlight and Moonlight. It's a streaming remote desktop that's meant for streaming gaming, and so it's really good at video and audio.

At work we use Meshcentral. It requires you to host your own server, but it's very powerful, and very reliable. We're managing something like 400 remote systems with it currently. We also use Netbird as a secondary access layer (I prefer it to Tailscale for the simplicity of setting up ACLs, and the really easy deployment).

For most home server usage though, I wouldn't bother with Meshcentral. It's a lot of overhead if you're only managing a couple of systems. If you really need remote desktop (why do your servers even have desktops?) use RustDesk instead.

ssh

RDP (the same protocol Windows Remote Desktop uses) works fine on Linux. I'd suggest investigating why that suddenly stopped working for you.

For what it's worth Xrdp seems to work well on Linux for enabling a RDP Remote Desktop server.. I suspect you are / were(?) already using Xrdp and just need to figure out why it stopped working.

Nomachine with local & Wireguard access only.

I think Anydesk can be trusted as much as any company. They did notify users when a breach occurred a couple of years ago. By contrast Teamviewer was hacked and blamed their customer's "password reuse" for years before finally admitting they had a breach. The company cannot be trusted.

I use Anydesk occasionally to help friends but never leave it running if it's not actively in use.

I use freerdp. it's simple, works well, just use it via the terminal. I have it alias'd so I don't even have to think about it.

Edited, thanks @Björn:

Whatever destination computer you're looking to connect to, install Sunshine.

Then on the source computer, use Moonlight to connect to the destination.

vnc with tailscale, i prefer this over others like moonlight since it can show non-blurry/original image, especially noticeable for text