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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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Honest question: who still uses VNC? I think it’s only relevant because it’s just kind of a safe fallback but not because it’s particularly great at anything.
It’s built into every Mac
https://support.apple.com/en-us/103229#%3A%7E%3Atext=Sharing%2C+Printer+Discovery-%2C5900%2C-TCP
I know, but I’ve never seen anyone use it. People use rustdesk or something like that anymore.
I use it for a headless Mac mini, otherwise yeah better solutions exist
The underlying protocol (RFB) is very simple to implement, and in fact some friends and I implemented both a VNC client and server as part of a project we worked on at university nearly 20 years ago.
Because of this, it's common to find it in various places, especially for interacting with systems that don't have an OS installed yet:
Most good VPS providers provide VNC access so you can set up your own OS from an ISO, use Clonezilla to clone the drive over the network, recover files if the drive gets corrupted somehow, etc. It's a built-in feature of KVM/libvirt that the providers usually expose using something like NoVNC in their control panel. The common off-the-shelf control panels (Virtualizor, SolusVM, Virtfusion, Proxmox, etc) all have it as a standard feature.
A lot of IPMI/BMC and KVM-over-IP systems use VNC too, for a similar purpose, just for physical hardware rather than VMs. The protocol being very simple makes it easy to build a simple version into an embedded system. This is also usually accessed via NoVNC in a web UI.
I've been in the cloud space so long that I'm like "vnc what the fuuuuck" while I dick about with cloudinit