this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 145 points 1 week ago (15 children)

Rustdesk looks good on the outside, but if you look inside, it has a really bad codebase and has done some sketchy stuff in the past.

Last year, it installed custom root certificates as trusted on windows, which is a huge security risk: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6444

On linux systems, it forced its own autostart with no option to disable this behavior: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/4863

In the past, when it didn’t have Wayland support yet, it edited your GDM config and just disabled wayland: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/1.1.9/src/platform/linux.rs#L411-L422

Furthermore, the code quality is really bad. 90% of the linux platform-dependant code is just executing shell commands and parsing their output, while the same could be achieved in a safe way with proper rust builtins: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/master/src/platform/linux.rs

While I agree that Rustdesk works pretty flawlessly, the codebase and the behavior of the developers made me distrust the software and I don’t recommend using it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Wth is that, that is the most anti-idiomatic code I have ever seen

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/master/src%2Fplatform%2Flinux.rs#L176

pub fn get_cursor() -> ResultType<Option<u64>> {
    let mut res = None;
    DISPLAY.with(|conn| {
        if let Ok(d) = conn.try_borrow_mut() {
            if !d.is_null() {
                unsafe {
                    let img = XFixesGetCursorImage(*d);
                    if !img.is_null() {
                        res = Some((*img).cursor_serial as u64);
                        XFree(img as _);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    });
    Ok(res)
}

I'm not an expert but this seems wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yep, I'm not a Rust expert either, but this is pretty cursed. The comments on this post have some more examples of bad rustdesk code: https://lobste.rs/s/njfvjb/rustdesk_with_tailscale_on_arch_linux

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