// the find
kunkundi/crossdesk
A lightweight, cross-platform remote desktop software with support for Web Client access | 一款支持 Web 客户端访问的轻量级跨平台远程桌面软件。
CrossDesk is a self-hostable remote desktop tool written in C++ that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, with a browser-based client as a first-class option. It's built on top of MiniRTC, the author's own WebRTC-like transport library, and targets developers and sysadmins who want something lighter than RustDesk or TeamViewer without depending on someone else's relay infrastructure.
The web client is a genuine differentiator — being able to control a desktop from an iOS Safari session without installing anything is exactly what you want when you're away from your main machine. The transport stack (KCP + SRTP + COTURN) is doing real work, not hand-waving 'WebRTC' at you while hiding the details. The Windows service handles the annoying locked-screen and Ctrl+Alt+Del cases that most hobby remote-desktop projects just skip. The xmake build with optional CUDA hardware encoding is well-structured; the Docker path for building without a local CUDA install is a nice practical touch.
The self-hosted server requires manual certificate handling — the default self-signed cert setup asks you to distribute and install a root CA across every client machine, which is fiddly and error-prone in practice. The codebase appears to be a single developer's project with the README written primarily in Chinese and a shallow English translation; the issue templates and most community discussion will be in Chinese, which is a real adoption barrier for Western teams. MiniRTC is a git submodule commit with no separate release tags or API stability guarantees, so you're implicitly coupling your deployment to whatever HEAD the author pushes. There are no documented security advisories or audit history, which matters when you're punching holes in your firewall for a remote access tool.