Any teh peeps use Anydesk free for personal use? Since the last update (4 days ago I think) I've had a 5 second nag screen before connecting to a remote device. Just wondering if this is everybody, i.e. they are doing a marketing thing, or is this the early stages of them flagging me as a "commercial" user. 

It's free for personal use, but they do, apparently, have algorithms that aim to detect professional use and if they think somebody's cheating, they introduce a nag screen until that user requests to be whitelisted. Eventually they start time-capping the sessions. I think the nag screen in this case is 25 seconds, but i have no idea whether it starts small and increases. I never have used it in any commercial way and have no intention of doing so.

Seems nobody else here uses it.

Since there's a number of non-proprietary alternatives, does it do stuff that they don't?

I emailed the Anydesk help desk to ask the question and they haven't replied yet. Seems they have periodic anxiety attacks about their free product being used commercially. There's a whitelist procedure for people who have been incorrectly identified as commercial users, but it seems to be a bit hit and miss. I suspect too many customers both paying and non-paying + too small a help desk.

Yeah, for what I want VNC is actually better. It doesn't have a hissy fit if one or both devices are using a VPN for instance. I was using VNC for my linux boxes anyway so I've dumped Anydesk and put VNC on everything I want to connect to & from. Haven't missed it at all so far.

Seems like a glorified VNC?

That's what I figured, but wasn't sure if there was some must-have feature.

No, that's exactly what it is. There are plenty of bells and whistles in the GUI but these days most of them are either there or accessible some other way with most of the varieties of VNC. Anyway, for linux I'm more likely to use PuTTY for remote stuff. I do find a graphical connection handy if I'm not quite sure what I want, but I'll know if I see it. Bit easier than trying to grep when I don't know what to stick on the right hand side.

Not quite sure why I was using Anydesk as opposed to VNC. Tried it and got used to it I suppose.

VNC for corporate dummies I reckon, easier to install, configure and use for faux stuck in Windows (or Mac) World, plus there's somebody you can sue when it goes south.

That was my thought, but I also think there's a "business" prejudice at work here. I took a squint at the RealVNC pricing and it's considerably cheaper than Anydesk. Both very stable. Both do the job. Both offer support and "somebody to sue". But the VNC base code is open sauce and there are plenty of IT managers who simply can't stomach that. 


 

I forgot there are other commercial vnc products. TigerVNC is free and also cross-platform. For that matter RDP is more performant than vnc (ime) and viewable on open source vnc clients -- is that still free on Win 10/11?

Remote Desktop is free in Pro and server editions of Windows. That's what we used at work. 

It's quite something to see an ancient Dell C2D business SFF pc with Intel graphics driving Win10 to a 27" iMac display via RDP. Amazingly responsive.

I upgraded my home PC to from normal Win 10 to Win 10 Pro specifically so I can use RDP to log in to it from work to make it look as if I'm working when, actually, I'm pissing about on my home PC*.

I think it cost about £7 with an upgrade key acquired from eBay.


*in my defence, we've had fuck all work for months and, in fact, have now emptied our order book and are shutting up shop. It's been so long doing naff-all it's going to be a major shock to the system in three weeks when I start my new job!