It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
Apple Remote Desktop. Batch control of computers through SSH and VNC would be amazing.
like Remmina?
Does remmina let you send an ssh command to multiple computers at once? I use ARD for that almost exclusively.
maybe, allthough I need to test ARD to see how they do it.
Remmina allows you to run a command on connect, or set up individual commands to execute
Yeah I tested it out. The feature in ARD that I am referring to is that you can do any of the main functions (observe the screen, copy a file, install a file, run a terminal command, shut down, etc) to any number of computers at the same time. You just shift click command click to select multiple computers and then press the button associated with that function. That you can’t do is control multiple computers at the same time, since that wouldn’t really be practical, but you can observe all of their screens and then double click on one of them to start controlling it.
Really the most useful thing here is the ability to send an arbitrary terminal command to multiple computers at the same time, which you can’t do in Remmina.
So I tested Remmina some more, and yea, my expectations for the exec plugin were broken. It only runs commands locally, I really thought it was for sending saved commands remotely.
I guess ARD is king, at least from the solutions I know of. Personally, I achieve the “see all screens (or well ssh connections)” and the “send command across all connections” with tmux. And if I need RDP, SPICE or VNC, I use Remmina.
Windows users can use Royal TS, but that is paid and proprietary.
Apple remote desktop? Apple doesn’t support RDP. They do have a VNC client built in however