Install AnyDesk on Ubuntu Linux [GUI and Terminal Methods]
Brief: This beginner’s tutorial discusses both GUI and terminal methods of installing AnyDesk on Ubuntu-based Linux distributions.
AnyDesk is a popular remote desktop software available for Linux, Windows, BSD, macOS and mobile platforms.
With this tool, you can remotely access other computer using AnyDesk or let someone else remotely access your system. Not everyone can access it just because two devices use AnyDesk. You have to accept the incoming connection and/or provide a password for secure connection.
This is helpful in providing tech support to friend, family, colleagues or even to the customers.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you both graphical and command line ways of installing AnyDesk on Ubuntu. You can use either method based on your preference. Both methods will install the same AnyDesk version on your Ubuntu system.
The same method should be applicable to Debian and other Debian and Ubuntu based distributions such as Linux Mint, Linux Lite etc.
Non-FOSS alert!
AnyDesk is not open source software. It is covered here because it is available on Linux and the article’s focus is on Linux.
Method 1: Install AnyDesk on Ubuntu using terminal
Open the terminal application on your system. You’ll need a tool like wget to download files in the terminal. For that, use the following command:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install wget
The next step now is to download the GPG key of AnyDesk repository and add it to your system’s trusted keys. This way, your system will trust the software coming from this external repository.
wget -qO - https://keys.anydesk.com/repos/DEB-GPG-KEY | sudo apt-key add -
You may ignore the deprecated warning about apt-key command for now. The next step is to add the AnyDesk repository to your system’s repository sources:
echo "deb http://deb.anydesk.com/ all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/anydesk-stable.list
Update the package cache so that your system learns about the availability of new applications through the newly added repository.
sudo apt update
And now, you can install AnyDesk:
sudo apt install anydesk
Once that is done, you can start AnyDesk from the system menu or from the terminal itself:
anydesk
You can enjoy AnyDesk now.

Method 2: Install AnyDesk on Ubuntu graphically
If you are not comfortable with the command line, no worries. You can also install AnyDesk without going into the terminal.
You can download AnyDesk for Ubuntu from the official AnyDesk website:
You’ll see a Download Now button. Click on it.

When you click on the download button, it gives you options for various Linux distributions. Select the one for Ubuntu:

It will download the DEB file of AnyDesk application. Installing deb file is easy. Either double click on it or right click and open with Software Install.

Software Center application will be opened and you can install it from there.

Once installed, search for it in the system menu and start from there.

That’s it. Not too hard, is it?
I am not going to show the steps for using AnyDesk. I think you already have some idea about that. If not, refer to this article, please.
Troubleshooting tip
When I tried to run AnyDesk from the system menu, it didn’t start. So, I started it from the terminal and it showed me this error:
[email protected]:~$ anydesk
anydesk: error while loading shared libraries: libpangox-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
If you see the error while loading shared libraries message, you install the package it is complaining about. Here’s what I did in my case:
sudo apt install libpangox-1.0-0
That solved the issue for me and I hope it fixes for you as well.
If you have any questions related to this topic, please let me know in the comment section.
Good day. Ubuntu 20 system, remote server. Installed AnyDesk but it doesn’t want to run as root. I added a new user ***, I go in, start AnyDesk, nothing happens. How to solve a problem? I go to a remote server via rdp, a conflict may arise, so it does not start? Help solve the question, how to start AnyDesk?
i did all the steps and installed the any desk but I wont open , it just keep loading loading …………still loading
have it, “sort of” working. First, since anydesk is proprietary, I won’t put it on my primary system. I created a VM for it. Hypervisor: KVM-QEMU. Guest: Debian 11, LXQT. I connected to the VM using spice viewer, and established a remote control session to a Windows 11 (physical PC).
Performance is unusable: tens of seconds, even minutes, between key-press or mouse-click and the result being rendered on my screen. Same connection over MS-Quick-Assist (running on a Windows 10 VM) was speedy. Tried XFCE: no better. Tried connecting to my VM via xRDP: in this case, anydesk won’t launch. So many potential bottlenecks, guess I’m going to have to build a dedicated bare-metal Debian to try, unless someone here has already solved this. Thanks.
UBUNTU 22.04
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/pangox-compat/libpangox-1.0-0_0.0.2-5.1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libpangox-1.0-0_0.0.2-5.1_amd64.deb
This is what I’m looking for
Thank you,
this is really helpful
Glad you found it helpful.