Not that I use them anymore anyway, cancelling my old account, but name and shame any companies who conveniently can't support their free base. Also - it's VNC. It's a protocol. There's a dozen free clients out there.
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I think the main reason this comes as a Fuck You to a lot of folks is that this came with (don't know if it still does) Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS as the default VNC software. So a lot of hobbyists might have not thought about this in a long time and are suddenly facing needing to set up SSH suddenly because the VNC they were using is now off the table. (Makes me glad I defaulted to SSH+keys pretty soon after learning how to use it)
It probably should have never been bundled as the default for a hobbyist operating system. I guess we've seen the writing on the wall for the Raspberry Pi Foundation making bad moves for a while now.
Oh man, I didn't even think about this. Anyone have any good guides on replacing RealVNC on raspbian with an alternative for our new linux friends who don't know how to do it easily?
BEFORE you mess with your VNC, it is extremely important to have a backup connection. So either you have the ability to connect your pi to a monitor and a keyboard locally, or you really, really should setup SSH before you mess with your VNC server.
Use SSH with a Certificate, described here: https://raspberrypi-guide.github.io/networking/connecting-via-ssh ("passwordless") This guide doesn't show how to set up SSH, but how to install a key in a more detailed way: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-ssh-keys/
The good thing: Once you got this working, you're basically done. Just ditch VNC and go straight to SSH from now on. It's more secure and has better performance usually.
Yet, if you like your VNC and want to continue using it, you first connect via SSH do not do this while using a VNC connection! Now, first, you do all this: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-vnc-raspberry-pi-os then you do a
you should see tightvnc listed there. Don't freak out if one of the two returns an error that the application was not found. That's okay. Not all versions of Raspbian used the same application name in the past, so I listed them both. As long as one of them works, you're fine.
Then, you do a
and change it to tightvnc. now you can stop your running VNC:
Once you did that, connect to tightvnc as described in the article. If this works, do
sudo apt uninstall realvncYou should now be able to connect via VNC without weird account bullshit.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bookworm-the-new-version-of-raspberry-pi-os/
So reading around it looks like Raspberry Pi Foundation now suggests TigerVNC because its optimized for Wayland and the newer version of Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) is all Wayland now. RealVNC is not optimized for Wayland and now is pulling this shit on Home users.
I haven't tested this myself yet, just found it through some quick searching.
How-To Set Up TigerVNC on RPi OS Bookworm: https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/tigervnc-and-realvnc-on-raspberry-pi-bookworm-os/
But this How-To seems to recognize the reasons why the changeover is happening and what RPi Foundation suggests to use, so it seems like a good place to start.
TigerVNC also seems to be Open Source and unpaid, so it seems like a valid replacement option for the moment.
https://tigervnc.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TigerVNC
It looks like Bookworm is supported all the way back to the Pi 3B+ which is good news for me, specifically. Sounds like its some hoops to jump through in the Raspberry Pi OS Imaging Tool to get it to happen, but it's there.
I am unsure about TigerVNC support for previous versions of the RPi OS, but its maybe still possible for older models.
Long-time happy TigerVNC user. Solid product. Active development. Responsive to bug reports and feature requests.