Launching Qubox

Eight months ago I started writing a remote desktop client because I was tired of being unable to use my Linux box remotely without a sluggish session and a cloud account. Today we're publishing Qubox under Apache-2.0.

What it is

Qubox is a five-binary, ten-crate Rust workspace for low-latency screen sharing, built for the people who actually run their own hardware. It spans:

• A native CLI client with GPU-accelerated decoding and per-display compositing
• A Tauri/React GUI launcher
• A background daemon that runs as a systemd user service
• A host agent with cross-platform capture (X11, PipeWire, DXGI, macOS ScreenCaptureKit)
• An optional signaling relay for NAT-traversal

The wire protocol is QUIC, end-to-end encrypted with TLS 1.3. Updates are signed with TUF. Everything is Apache-2.0.

Why open source

There are three good remote-desktop products that target the same audience as Qubox. None of them are open source. None of them let you audit the wire protocol. None of them let you self-host the relay without paying a "team" tax.

That's the gap. Qubox exists to fill it.

The plan is the standard open-core model: the protocol, the binaries, and the relay are and will remain free. The hosted managed relay — which saves you the bother of running a relay yourself — will be a paid tier when it graduates from beta.

What works today

• Linux ↔ Linux on the same network, 5-20 ms RTT, 120 Hz
• macOS ↔ Linux, 60 Hz with audio
• Windows ↔ Linux, 60 Hz with audio
• Pen/stylus capture on all three
• Clipboard sync with image deduplication
• TUF-signed updates

What's next

The roadmap for the next 90 days is on GitHub Discussions. The big-ticket items:

• AV1 hardware decode where available
• Multi-monitor tiling in the CLI
• WebTransport gateway (browser clients)
• A Windows MSI installer that doesn't need admin rights

Try it

Five-minute quickstart in the docs. The Discord is linked in the README. Issues and PRs welcome.

— MMP Dev, founder