You don't need a remote desktop for the room you're standing in
Someone plugs in the HDMI cable. The room's display shows nothing, or shows 1024×768, or shows the desktop of whoever presented last week. After a minute of this, somebody says "just share your screen", and out comes AnyDesk or TeamViewer. It works. It is also the wrong shape for the problem, and noticing why turns out to be more interesting than it sounds. What remote desktop tools are actually for AnyDesk, TeamViewer and RustDesk exist to solve one problem well: reach a machine you are not near. Your parent's laptop. A server in a rack. A colleague's desktop three time zones away. Everything about their design follows from that. One person connects to one machine. That person takes the mouse. The remote screen is mirrored to them, and the whole session is framed as control — because when you are not in the room, control is the only way to do anything. Being fair about the privacy question, because it is the claim people reach for first and it is wrong: AnyDesk has a LAN mode , and in it a session goes directly between the two machines without the internet. RustDesk can be self-hosted entirely on your own infrastructure. Neither of these tools forces your screen through somebody's cloud if you configure them not to. If you have read that they do, that is not accurate. The mismatch is not privacy. It is shape. The relay, the account and the NAT traversal are not overhead — they are the product, and they are what makes reaching a machine in another country possible at all. Standing beside the machine, you pay for all three and use none of them. Where the shape stops fitting Stand in a room with four people and a Mac, and three things go wrong at once. It is one-to-one. Remote desktop is a session between two endpoints. Four people looking at one screen is not what it models, so three of them read over a shoulder. It mirrors, and mirroring is sometimes the wrong answer. Every tool in this category shows a screen that already exists. But the meeting-room problem is oft