[HN Gopher] Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
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Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 353 points
Date : 2022-10-06 09:20 UTC (13 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (mjg59.dreamwidth.org)
| kkfx wrote:
| Few personal notes:
|
| - workstation model means working on a good (physical) desktop
| setup, large main monitor, eventual other(s) monitor(s), good
| keyboard, perhaps a thumb trackball instead of a mouse etc, oh,
| sure potentially the same can happen with a docked laptop but...
|
| - ...laptop model means being able to move. If we WFH there
| aren't much reasons to move, well except when moving means
| relocate elsewhere. In practice MOST laptop users do not use
| their computers to be operational on the go but as a desktop
| replacer in suboptimal improvised setups, while those who need a
| good laptop can hardly find one.
|
| The real issue came out in lack of knowledge from _most_ about
| how remote works should be done. We have seen a big PR campaigns
| for more than a decades about nomadic workers who works on
| unstable and limited mobile network with PCMCIA /3G modems cards,
| then USB stick/HSPA stuff, portable hotspot, mobile tethering etc
| in a bar (so with potentially hostile and distracting
| surroundings) or on a beach (added to a potentially hostile
| climate/environment for mobile devices) and this model who push
| from "big notebook" to netbook to ultrabooks etc obviously fails
| miserably since it can't really work. We can work in such setup
| for a limited period of time for limited tasks but nothing more.
|
| Now many start to admit that the solution is going back to the
| classic desk BUT this means every home need a room with a proper
| setup and so is an effort on both the worker and the company. A
| thing most reject.
|
| Substantially: it's about time to tell things clear. The modern
| web is CRAP made to sell services instead of empower users
| through IT plus an admission that classic commercial desktop
| model is also CRAP. We damn need _real_ desktops with document-
| based UIs, working locally and syncing just data that need to be
| synced. As we do as humans, anyone who do a certain job with a
| significant degree of independence in a single company.
|
| To do so from remote we need a damn room per worker, well
| equipped, rented to the employer for a fair rate and establish
| clear contracts on that work paradigm.
|
| Try to keep up the crappy surveillance capitalism business who
| can be translated in "rent someone else services, own nothing",
| in the trace of WEF/2030 https://youtu.be/Hx3DhoLFO4s famous
| video it's a very expensive absurdity. Try to keep up hybrid
| craps to avoid real capex is another absurdity.
|
| Those who are eligible to work from home and want such paradigm
| should offer a proper room for that, companies should be clear
| "you are hired for remote works AND REMOTE ONLY, eventual travel
| to meed in persons must not happen more than once in a while"
| where the timeframe vary depending on the company and workers
| geographical distance.
|
| Let's do that and we all benefit, companies and workers together
| in a win-win move those only loser will be GAFAM and friends
| (from Citrix to Bomgar). Avoid doing so and we will keep an
| inconsistent liquid situation that can be trivially called like
| the famous Full Metal Jacket Sg. Hartman definition on the most
| common amphibious thing so called ...
| nefix wrote:
| Disclamer: I'm part of the IsardVDI project
| (https://gitlab.com/isard/isardvdi)
|
| With RDP, in our experience, the latency issue is nonexistent.
| We've even have successfully run workstations editing 4k video
| with 0 issues. Yes, for those extreme cases you need a GPU (and
| the only option is NVIDIA Grid, which are really expensive cards
| with licensing on top of that), but for the most part, if the
| hypervisor has a good CPU, it's more than enough, we have clients
| that even use RDP through the browser.
|
| You don't even need to have a really good internet connection.
| Also, SPICE is really good too, with really good desktop
| integration
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Reading his description of the issues, it sure sounds like
| they're as good as I'd think. I'm more optimistic about the
| gitpod-style remote development environments, honestly. But that
| post describes exactly what I expected from a "cloud desktop." I
| wouldn't expect someone to get much done if I inflicted that kind
| of work environment on them.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Not sure who thinks these are good. Perhaps for basic programming
| or in slow moving orgs but outside these two use cases cloud
| desktops are horrible.
| superkuh wrote:
| Mirror for those that get blocked by dreamwidth like me:
| https://archive.ph/7RDZP
| GianFabien wrote:
| The cost of a new fullly-spec'd workstation + high performance
| laptop is tiny compared to the salary of good software
| developers. Managements have a warped sense of how to save money
| and as a result grossly hurt morale and productivity where it
| matters the most.
| tpush wrote:
| > The cost of a new fullly-spec'd workstation + high
| performance laptop is tiny compared to the salary of good
| software developers.
|
| That depends highly on where you are in the world.
| asdff wrote:
| $3000 every 3 years is not alot of money to spend per head,
| unless you are considering somewhere with developer salaries
| in the $10,000 range or something like that.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It almost doesn't. Computers are now cheap enough and
| developers mobile enough that it holds through all of the
| developing world, and most of the underdeveloped world.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Hardware appears as expense on the balance sheet. Lost time
| not.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| It's not one big pile of money. Business expenditures are
| treated differently depending on what you spend it on.
|
| My loose understanding is that capex (e.g. hardware) and opex
| (e.g. salary) are treated differently in a lot of ways. Some of
| it is taxes, there are deductions available for opex that don't
| apply to capex, at least in the US. Also, you can cut your
| expenses on opex to balance your budget (e.g. layoffs), but
| it's harder to recoup the sunk cost on capex.
|
| Cloud desktops turn some capex into opex. Depending on how many
| employees you have, it can be a sizeable chunk of change.
|
| I still think it's only worth it in specific edge cases,
| though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Some companies in UK still provide 1080p monitors of the lowest
| quality
| yrgulation wrote:
| In my whole career i only had one company that provided
| windows machines and as expected it was a horrible place to
| work at. Current client wants to do the same. Coincidentally
| the place is becoming less desirable to work with.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Outside of silicon valley, the business world runs on
| Windows, no matter how cheap or expensive the machines are.
|
| Being inflexible can certainly be a red flag though.
| yrgulation wrote:
| My clients are all based in the uk and nearly all run on
| macos, except those at the bottom.
| aeyes wrote:
| But the problem isn't Windows or MacOS. It's all the
| corporate spyware, antivirus, network interception and
| whatever else they come up with making the machines work
| like its 1995.
| yrgulation wrote:
| That is spot on and indeed a red flag. Imagine hiring
| people and the spying on them.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| Ironically, in the fabs making chips for the silicon
| valley, (almost) everything runs embedded Windows.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| At least they provide monitors. I imagine that many don't.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| With cloud gaming you can stream 4K games at 60FPS, with clarity
| and quality for fast moving objects.
|
| Why does remote desktop still shit itself when I move around MS
| Word with a few pictures?
|
| I know a tier 1 financial company that offer 100k / year
| developers a slow VM and from there you have to log into another
| VM. The VMs are dual core, 8GB. I watch in horror as each
| keypress takes more than a second. The amount of lost
| productiviry is in millions
|
| Shadow offers remote desktop environment with GPU acceleration
| where you can run games and it feels responsive and decent.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I would also like to know this. I'm interested in doing fintech
| development... but there's no amount of money someone could pay
| me to use a consistently laggy environment. This thread is
| making it sound like it's commonplace.
| orloffm wrote:
| Those companies don't have GPU acceleration in Windows 10.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You can use the parsec client, usually dedicated to gaming, to
| work on a cloud desktop. It works really well.
| mvdwoord wrote:
| Application streaming was and perhaps is still a thing. I
| remember the softricity days... (Not fondly as the process to
| prepare application bundles was cumbersome).
| hasel wrote:
| What's the input latency like in those cloud games?
| asdff wrote:
| You can't play an fps with them but they are fine for turn
| based strategy and similar games. I did some beta testing for
| google stadia with assassins creed oddyssey when it was still
| being conceived, and while it was mostly playable (single
| player game though, I would not consider it competitively
| playable against other humans), even with my wired 1g fiber
| connection the service would have these huge drops down to
| almost 144p quality along with framerate issues.
| iosjunkie wrote:
| You can try it for yourself with Nvidia's GeForce Now free
| tier. Just connect with Ethernet if possible.
|
| My experience is that it's definitely playable and beats a
| low power laptop with an underpowered video card. Latency in
| the 40ms range, and barely perceptible.
| NotHereNotThere wrote:
| From a former Stadia user; latency was never an issue or
| noticeable with a 4K stream. And I've played quite a bit of
| fast paced shooters in the platform.
|
| The experience is extremely dependent on location, bandwidth,
| local setup and availability of close services (in my case,
| the closest DC was <15ms away according to Stadia telemetry).
| groovybits wrote:
| I've been a Shadow PC [0] user on and off for the past few
| years. The performance was very good, granted I have a 1
| gigabit Internet connection.
|
| 0: https://shadow.tech
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Not the OP, but i know for something like PlayStation Now, it
| was acceptable for most games. It was a pleasure to just
| decide to play a game and well yeah, I was playing the game.
| The latency wasn't a concern.
|
| I couldn't see myself playing an FPS on it, but then I prefer
| kb/m anyways. But for the games I play on console? It was
| fine.
|
| There can still be issues, of course, but the latency overall
| wasn't a deterrent.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| Privacy is also terrible in cloud desktops (and cloud apps) but
| many (most?) developers do not see it as a concern. It's too late
| to push for privacy in cloud software - especially when it's
| developers who are the strongest advocates for user-tracking in
| cloud desktops.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Really depends on the environment. Almost all developers I know
| are pretty big on privacy and critical of the negative
| implications of users sharing too much. If you work at Google
| or Facebook they will plant different ideas into your brain.
|
| IT security might be slow, but they also found out that it
| isn't the users that pay them, it is management. Some concerns
| have validity, but there is also a lot of crap sold as
| security.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| _Almost all developers I know are pretty big on privacy and
| critical of the negative implications of users sharing too
| much. If you work at Google or Facebook they will plant
| different ideas into your brain._
|
| I wish I could share a similar sentiment. But my impression
| is that privacy is low down the priority of many developers.
| Even this thread has 300+ comments and yet has not one single
| comment raising the privacy implications a cloud OS/desktop.
| destroy-2A wrote:
| Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1
| layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every
| keystroke, your brain starts to add latency to latency that is
| not there to compensate for a life lived wearing citrix latency
| goggles.
| kmarc wrote:
| O.o Rarely see people like us here! :-)
|
| For me what worked is a setup where I used an Arch linux
| laptop, ran f5vpn in docker and used the citrix client with
| some tweaks through that vpn connection.
|
| It was a lot faster than my colleagues' Mac / Win client, and
| even better, it was automatable to start up and run everything.
|
| Ha! I did document this beautiful setup:
| https://github.com/kmARC/f5vpn-in-docker
| irusensei wrote:
| My employer blocks Linux clients for whatever reason. Even if
| you pass through the initial checks there is some kind of
| system on the Remote Desktop that detects your local setup
| and kicks you out.
|
| So I use a KVM Windows machine with Virtio drivers. QXL seems
| to be the best video solution.
| tmaly wrote:
| reminds me of the days of dial up modem.
| bonyt wrote:
| I am at a law firm that uses a remote system like that. Have
| definitely gone two Citrix's deep for some things, so I feel
| this.
|
| Honestly, though, it's better than the laptop the other firms
| have given me. One took over 10 minutes to boot, iirc. It
| wasn't just the hardware, there was just so much ... stuff,
| multiple layers of antivirus seemingly hooking all of the
| system calls and fighting with each other, and a document
| management system with blocking I/O everywhere that was somehow
| so embedded in Windows that it could seem to freeze the whole
| system.
|
| The thin client setup may have latency, but at least it is
| convenient and it gets there eventually. Though I would swear
| it's getting slower, or maybe my patience is waning.
| m463 wrote:
| Don't worry, I'm sure that will all be folded into microsoft
| teams soon :)
|
| More seriously, I'm reminded of something a friend always said.
|
| You need to have a response time of 1/10 of a second or less
| for something to be interactive. I remember that but I wonder
| if the brain fixes it like it ignores your blind spot.
| just_boost_it wrote:
| I quit a job because of citrix. Exactly like you said, very
| noticeable latency. It ate into my productivity as a part of my
| mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions
| to appear on screen.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| I didn't deal with citrix but I did have to frequently SSH
| into cruise ships at a job some years ago. Goodness was the
| latency frustrating beyond belief. I didn't last more than 6
| months at that job.
|
| Every single command input/key stroke could take 2-5+ seconds
| to display on my screen. Imagine trying to troubleshoot
| something critical in that type of environment. Luckily, I
| didn't encounter anything truly critical, it was mostly
| maintenance tasks and such.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > part of my mental energy was going into waiting for
| feedback to my actions to appear on screen
|
| This should not be underestimated. I was in a situation like
| this and I though my short term memory stopped working. I
| forget what steps I already did because some actions took
| 10-15 seconds. I often switched to another task in the
| meantime and could not recollect the last step I did 10
| seconds ago. Such delays are poison for for intellectual task
| where you would need concentration for.
|
| There is no excuse for any modern device to make such pauses.
| It is also far too expensive for any company. The price for
| hardware is too low to let any user wait.
| just_boost_it wrote:
| That's exactly it. Instead of tasks going "1, 2, 3" in my
| head, it was more like "1,...,1,...,1". I had to keep
| reloading every task into my working memory, with lots of
| brief pauses to think "did that click register", or "when I
| typed those words, was the context on that text box?". It's
| a truly torturous level of friction.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > part of my mental energy was going into waiting for
| feedback to my actions to appear on screen.
|
| Sounds like my life as a developer too. =D
| markandrewj wrote:
| This has been my experience with Citrix also, although I have
| heard it can be set up to work better. Has anyone had
| experience with HP Anywhere/Teradaci? I am curious how it would
| compare.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Printing worked great though, right?
| sshagent wrote:
| Ergh! You're giving me PTSD. I still recall those days
| _shudder_ Best of luck with that
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| You simply get used to it. In many industry sectors (think CPU
| architects), multiple layers of inception is the norm (crossing
| multiple operating systems), and it is not strange for a
| keystroke to take 2 seconds, and for a menu to open and finish
| rendering in 10 seconds. This "experience" is probably the
| reason why I can still comfortably work over a DSL link with
| just network X (even though I still find NX much more
| comfortable).
|
| You really just adapt your way of interacting, and start
| planning more carefully every one of your actions instead of
| simply clickety-clacketing everywhere like if you were trying
| to win a game of Starcraft. It's practically subconscious and
| it really changes you.
|
| I always think it must be much, much worse for blind people.
|
| It also reminds me of people who complain that 5-minute build
| times "impair their productivity". How do you even work on
| _any_ mid-sized commercial codebase then ? It's not that
| uncommon for a build to take hours (e.g. games), and in
| engineering it is also not that uncommon for builds to take
| _days_ even on powerful server farms.
| ilaksh wrote:
| You're a CPU architect and you wait 2 seconds for a
| keystroke? And you stay in that job? You must be one of the
| dumbest geniuses I have ever met.
|
| That's absolutely ludicrous that anyone would be expected to
| work that way.
| joshxyz wrote:
| Traumatically well written lol
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| Does everyone here just suffer from exceptionally shitty IT
| departments? I've used Citrix for years and not experienced any
| of the chronic issues described here. Remember Citrix was
| developed in the 1990s... the days of Windows NT 3.5/4.0 [1] &
| Dial-Up connections and to be able to function well in these
| low bandwidth environments (we're talking _kilobits_ here
| people, a 10 Mbps LAN was considered _glorious_ at the time).
| For years ICA was superior to RDP due to its better compression
| over such connections. It sounds more like whoever setup your
| environments didn 't know what he was doing and the results are
| what you would expect.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNJiWPU4HEU
| omh wrote:
| [ Disclaimer - I am responsible for a Citrix environment, but
| I'm _reasonably_ proud of how well it works for our company ]
|
| The technology behind remote desktops is fundamentally limited
| but I'm amazed at how good the user experience can be on a
| modern well-configured Citrix environment.
|
| - The protocol responds well even on low bandwidth as long as
| latency is OK. On the office LAN it feels like a local
| computer.
|
| - There is offloading for Teams[1], media streams[2] and even
| entire web browsers[3]. The tech behind this is impressive and
| it works pretty well (mostly!)
|
| - For most staff it's easier to use a thin client or a minimal
| laptop.
|
| - I can keep the Citrix environment patched and managed much
| more easily than a proliferation of laptops and home devices.
|
| It can be a struggle at times and it's definitely not the right
| fit for developers. But it's got a lot of advantages and most
| of the time it works amazingly well.
|
| [1] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-
| desktops/m... [2] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-
| apps-desktops/m... [3] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-
| virtual-apps-desktops/m...
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Worked with Citrix for years at different customers. Think it
| is more about setup. Server capacity, bandwidth and so on.
| Often Citrix was used for connecting to a bastion or a jump
| host. Then an extra hop to the target machine. Some setups were
| laggy. Some worked just fine.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I was a "Citrix consultant" for about two decades.
|
| I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people,
| and within _minutes_ they would start ranting about how bad
| Citrix is.
|
| I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from
| customers _before_ a procedure.
|
| Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to
| this:
|
| _The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn 't
| use Citrix OR uses it from the head office with the 10 Gbps
| link._
|
| The poor schmuck in the backwater rural branch office on a 512
| Kbps link shared by two dozen staff gets no say in anything,
| especially not the WAN link capacity.
|
| I've seen large distributed orgs that were 100% Citrix
| "ugprade" from 2 Mbps WAN links to 4 Mbps to "alleviate network
| congestion" in an era where 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-home is
| standard. With 2 Mbps you can watch PDF documents slooooowly
| draw across the screen, top-to-bottom, line by line. Reminds me
| of the 2400 baud days in the early 90s downloading the first
| digital porn, eagerly watching the pixels filling the screen.
|
| Don't blame Citrix. Blame the bastard in the head office that
| doesn't give a f%@$ about anyone not him.
| acdha wrote:
| I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns.
| The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how
| to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a
| gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the
| connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic
| enterprise IT thinking, if it's not down your job is done -
| but I'm somewhat disappointed that it's even possible to
| configure it to have latency twice that of a modem.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms
| feels instant.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| That contradicts fairly long-held understanding:
|
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-
| times-3-important-...
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Under 100ms feels immediate. More doesnt.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Divide those figures by 10 might be closer to being
| accurate. 120ms is quite noticable. I know as I need to
| adjust latency out of Bluetooth headphones for recording.
| Recording with those latencies sounds like a disaster and
| is very very much noticable even with sounds let alone
| vision
| zasdffaa wrote:
| While my post was wrong, in fairness the context was
| specifically about keyboards. Nothing to do with audio. I
| suppose I should have been explicit but the context was
| keyboard entry.
| babypuncher wrote:
| This is just flat out wrong. Any seasoned gamer can feel
| the difference between a few tens of milliseconds.
|
| 300ms would render most video games unplayable.
|
| I see this claim a lot and it's making me want to build a
| website that gives you some common interactions (moving a
| mouse cursor, pressing a button) with adjustable latency
| so people can see just how big of an impact seemingly
| small amounts of lag have on how responsive something
| feels.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Then have an estimation challenge mode, where it picks a
| random latency and you have to guess within 50ms what it
| is. Seriously though, that sounds both fun and useful.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Sounds excellent. I would send that link around to a
| lotta people.
| petercooper wrote:
| Just running my display at 60Hz vs 30Hz is enough. The
| pointer feels extremely laggy at 30Hz, despite that being
| a higher refresh rate than a movie.
| rollcat wrote:
| https://aresluna.org/keyboard-secrets/typing-delay/
| Izkata wrote:
| After using xterm for years, I don't like gnome-terminal
| anymore because its lag while typing has become
| noticeable. It's right around 30ms on this site, and
| xterm around 10-20ms.
| acdha wrote:
| That's off by about an order of magnitude - highly
| skilled humans can see and react in less than 120ms. One
| thing which can complicate discussion on this is that
| there are different closely related things: how quickly
| you can see, understand, and react is slower than just
| seeing which is slower than seeing a change in an ongoing
| trend (that's why you notice stutter more than isolated
| motion), and there are differences based on the type of
| change (we see motion, contrast, orientation, and color
| at different latencies due to how signals are processed
| starting in the cortex and progressing through V1, V2,
| V3, V4, etc.) how focused you are on the action (e.g.
| watching to see a bird move is different than seeing the
| effect of something you're directly controlling). Audio
| is generally lower latency than visual, too.
|
| All of this means that the old figures are not useful as
| a rule of thumb unless your task is exactly what they
| studied. This paper notes how unhelpful that is with
| ranges from 2-100ms! They found thresholds around 25ms
| for some tasks but as low as 6ms for some tasks.
|
| https://www.tactuallabs.com/papers/howMuchFasterIsFastEno
| ugh...
|
| Keyboard latency is one of the harder ends of this
| spectrum: the users are focused, expecting a strong (high
| contrast, new signal) change in direct response to their
| action, and everything is highly trained to the point of
| being reflex.
|
| When I'm typing text, I'm not waiting for the change to
| hit a key outside of games but rather expecting things
| like text to appear as expected or a cursor to move.
| Awhile back I tested this and the latency difference
| between VSC's ~15ms key-to-character was noticeably
| smoother compared to 80+ms (Atom, Sublime) and the Citrix
| system I tested at 120-150ms (Notepad is like 15ms
| normally) was enough slower that it forced a different
| way of thinking about it (for me, that was "like a BBS"
| because I grew up in the 80s).
|
| n.b. I'm not an expert in this but worked in a
| neuroscience lab for years supporting researchers who
| studied the visual system (including this specific issue)
| so I'm very confident that the overall message is "it's
| complicated" even if I'm misremembering some of the
| details.
| mm007emko wrote:
| Not my experience. 300ms is noticeable and very annoying.
| 120ms does not feel instant to me.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| 300ms is a "long press" on a key on Android, and an
| eternity on an actual keyboard.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| That was a bad post. The figure of 300ms was from memory.
| I guess it's complex but for games shmup games
| (https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-
| perce...):
|
| "
|
| ...for Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), real-
| time is a requirement.
|
| As online gaming matures, players flock to games with
| more immersive and lifelike experiences. To satisfy this
| demand, developers now need to produce games with very
| realistic environments that have very strict data stream
| latency requirements: 300ms < game is
| unplayable 150ms < game play degraded
| 100ms < player performance affected 50ms >
| target performance 13ms > lower detectable
| limit
|
| "
|
| But this is real-time gaming. Typing should be less
| demanding, I'd think.
|
| Edit: also
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-
| short...
| flutas wrote:
| Just a heads up for others trying to read this, I think
| the < and > are backwards.
| viridian wrote:
| Generally I think of it in terms of number of frames @ 60
| fps.
|
| Anything below one frame (16.66ms) and whether or not any
| sort of real feedback is even received (let alone
| interpreted by the brain) becomes a probability density
| function. With each additional frame after that providing
| more and more kinesthetic friction until you become
| completely divorced from the feedback around 15-20
| frames.
| eloisant wrote:
| > Typing should be less demanding, I'd think.
|
| Not really, unless you're the kind of guy working in
| Cobol and who is used to typing with latency.
|
| I've seen Cobol developers just ignoring the latency,
| keeping typing because they know what they've typed and
| it doesn't matter that it's slow to show up on screen.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > I've seen Cobol developers just ignoring the latency,
| keeping typing because they know what they've typed and
| it doesn't matter that it's slow to show up on screen.
|
| I used to do that (not in COBOL), typing into a text
| editor in a terminal over a 2400-baud modem. Like the
| other commenter said, you get used to it, but it requires
| a certain predictability in your environment that you
| don't get in modern GUIs.
| toast0 wrote:
| Working with latency like that also requires the system
| to be predictable. If you're expecting auto complete but
| not confident in what it'll show, you've got to wait, if
| you're not sure if the input will be dropped if you type
| ahead too much, you've got to wait. If you need to click
| on things, especially if the targets change, lots of
| waiting.
|
| If the system works well, yeah, you can type all the
| stuff, then wait for it to show up and confirm. 'BBS
| mode' as someone mentioned.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Anything above 50 ms is absolutely noticeable and should
| be considered a bug.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The parent comment may be talking only about the network
| or Citrix components in the critical path. You also have
| to wait to get keyboard input (often 10s to many 10s of
| ms) and for double-buffering or composition (you might
| get updates and render during frame T, flip buffers to
| reach the OS compositor for frame T+1, have the
| compositor take another frame to render that and send it
| to the screen for frame T+2, though this is a bad case
| for a compositor, you may be paying the double buffering
| or flu latency twice). And it can take a while for modern
| LCD screens to process the inputs (changes towards the
| bottom of the screen take about a frame longer to
| display) and to physically switch the pixels.
|
| 120ms end-to-end without Citrix would be quite achievable
| with many modern systems (older systems (and programs
| written for them) were often not powerful enough to do
| some of the things that add latency to modern systems).
| So if Citrix 120ms we already get up to your 'not
| immediate' number.
|
| But I think you're also wrong in that eg typing latency
| can be noticeable even if you don't observe a pause
| between pressing a key and the character appearing. If I
| use google docs[1] for example, I feel like I am having
| to move my fingers through honey to type - the whole
| experience just feels sluggish.
|
| [1] this is on a desktop. On the iPad app I had multiple-
| second key press-to-display latency when adding a
| suggestion in the middle of a medium-sized doc.
| icedchai wrote:
| How long ago was this? 4 megabits would be pretty good...
| back in 1998!
| acdha wrote:
| This _very_ much depended on where you are. I had symmetric
| 10Mbps at home in 1998 but when we moved to New Haven in
| 2008 Verizon couldn't deliver more than ISDN / T1 to large
| chunks the city (we literally could have used a WiFi
| antenna to hit their regional headquarters, too). There's
| so much deferred maintenance around the world.
| icedchai wrote:
| True, true! I had a 3 megabit cable modem at home, back
| in 1998 (3 megabits down, 128kbits up, if I recall.)
|
| My office at the time had dual T1's... a little over 3
| megabits shared with roughly 500 people.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The last time I saw a place migrate the remote offices from
| a less than 10Mb/s network was around 2015. That same place
| replaced its mainframe at 2011 because of an enormous price
| hike.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 2017
| dboreham wrote:
| I've never used Citrix but I remember when I had a T-1
| (1.54Mbits for the younglings) and I left a Remote Desktop
| session open on a laptop. Some days later I went back to the
| laptop and used it for an hour before I realized I was in a
| RDP session to a machine in another state. I wonder what
| Citrix screwed up to make their UX so different. Of course a
| decent T-1 back then probably had better latency than today's
| consumer HFC connection.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Yeah the T1 easily had enough bandwidth to smoothly send
| the 800x600 16 bit color desktop you were probably running
| at the time (guessing the timeframe based on usage of a
| T1). Frame to frame diff was probably much easier as well
| with less shadows and graphical effects that modern Windows
| or Linux DEs have.
|
| I don't doubt Citrix has gotten worse as well but the job
| it had to do back then was much easier.
| prepend wrote:
| It seems to me that the reason why so many bad enterprise
| solutions are bought is because the buyer is not the user.
| It's such a funny thing to me that people would spend tons of
| money without firsthand experience or at least someone they
| trust using it.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how
| 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be
| attributed to them.
|
| Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge
| themselves into the halls of power and then start making
| decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that
| much.
|
| I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a
| way they themselves did not.
| jonfw wrote:
| sadly, the job of a CISO typically isn't "make the most
| pragmatic decisions possible to keep our infrastructure
| secure and running smoothly". In many industries, it's more
| lke "join as many compliance programs as possible to expand
| the ability to capture revenue from regulated markets".
|
| The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password
| rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for
| did
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| To your point, password rotation is considered an
| insecure practice because it causes people to append 1,
| 2, 3, etc to the same password.
|
| But I've seen so many companies that still insist on it.
| rmccue wrote:
| Our penetration testers suggested we add password
| rotation, and I had to quote them the latest NIST
| guidelines which state "Verifiers SHOULD NOT require
| memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g.,
| periodically)."
|
| If they don't know better, it's not surprising other
| companies don't either.
| selykg wrote:
| I'm the IT guy for a new non-profit. We aren't separated
| yet from the company that created us, but we're in the
| process of separating. I get to decide all this fun
| stuff.
|
| I had a very brief talk with the IT team for the larger
| parent company when I started and explained this stupid
| password rotation thing, as I came from a security
| background, they wanted nothing of it. Set in their ways.
|
| For the new non-profit that I'm helping spearhead, I'm
| not sure I'll get away from the password rotation
| entirely, but I can certainly set it to something more
| reasonable, like every 365 days, rather than every 60
| days or whatever travesty most are dealing with. I'm
| pretty pleased about this.
| als0 wrote:
| Aside from password rotation being a very questionable
| practice, it actually can cause productivity loss. In a
| big organisation like mine it can take up to 48 hours for
| a password change to synchronise across all the internal
| services. There's also the issue where some endpoint
| software still uses the old password behind the scenes
| and fails to log in too many times - causing your account
| to be locked. I guess you can see my frustration coming
| through.
| structural wrote:
| I had the joy of dealing with some endpoint software like
| this in an organization that had mandated password
| changes every 30 days. Very predictably, people set
| recurring "change your password" reminders for the 1st of
| the month and the organization lost an entire day of
| productivity each month as they locked themselves out of
| their accounts en masse. So the beginning of the month
| was always a panicked, all-hands-on-deck day for the help
| desk as people were waiting on hold for hours to get
| their account unlocked.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| NIST agrees, as if their update a few years ago.
|
| > Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be
| changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However,
| verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of
| compromise of the authenticator.
|
| https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret
| selykg wrote:
| Thanks for the direct link, putting this in my back
| pocket when the discussion inevitably takes place.
| acdha wrote:
| This is a really useful thing to keep in mind because
| even if you aren't directly bound by a requirement to
| follow the NIST standards, being able to point your
| policy people at that is handy if you can shift the
| conversation to "bring our policy in line with NIST"
| where there's a question about whether they'll later look
| bad for _not_ having done so. Typically these
| conversations are driven by risk aversion and things like
| federal standards help balance that perspective.
| patrakov wrote:
| > The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password
| rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked
| for did
|
| And it's the CISO job to resist unnecessary
| overcompliance which is just for the happiness of the
| sales team.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Isn't that just a characteristic of how they're evaluated?
| Any security error is the CISO's fault, "heads must roll",
| etc
|
| Given that, they're likely to give you what you are asking
| from them: a brick with no functionality which will do
| nothing. You can't do anything with Brick, but Brick has
| zero outstanding CVEs
| greedo wrote:
| CISO often stands for Chief Sacrificial Officer...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| irusensei wrote:
| Hah now imagine using Teams through Citrix workspace.
|
| One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup
| company with limited resources to handle all the bugs and
| crusty corpocrapware layers. The client craps on my HDR setup.
| It install a ton of crap you don't need and it relies on crap
| like HDX software running on your machine that last time I've
| checked it didn't had ARM binaries but this tech is also
| unavailable for the iOS clients. Meanwhile RDP can do semi-
| decent multimedia stuff without any of this crap.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Amusingly Microsoft purchased RDP from Citrix (like 30 years
| ago). See version 4:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol
| blevin wrote:
| > One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup
| company
|
| Founded 1989, 2021 revenue over $3B
| irusensei wrote:
| </sarcasm>
| caycep wrote:
| Or healthcare.....
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| This is me right now, but only for a short time (I hope). I'm
| at an agency and currently on my first ever banking client. I'm
| on a Mac but I use Citrix Viewer to access a Windows 10
| machine. The part I dislike the most is the context switching
| between Mac and Windows. First off, windows doesn't natively
| let you customize the keys (I can't install anything obviously,
| it's a bank client). Also, for some reason, the alt key doesn't
| work in the Citrix Viewer so I have to change a lot of my usual
| VSCode shortcuts to sone custom ones. I've googled the issue
| and some people on Mac use a program called Karabiner[1] but I
| didn't want to install yet another program, I'm just dealing
| with it for now.
|
| Our agency has another banking client that I hear sends you a
| laptop, I much rather have that.
|
| [1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
| roywiggins wrote:
| Maybe I'm immune to it, or just lucky, but two hops (Logging it
| at home to a Citrix Network Desktop to Remote Desktop to the PC
| in my office) has been _shockingly fine_. I live very close to
| the servers in question though, so speed of light isn 't a
| limiting factor, and I have solid and reasonably fast home
| internet. It _can_ work fine.
| leokennis wrote:
| I work in banking. Everything company-hosted I access via a
| split tunnel VPN. Everything else goes through the normal
| internet connection, with a company root CA inserted to sniff
| HTTPS traffic.
|
| One of the lucky few I guess :-)
| boppo1 wrote:
| What kind of banking? Tell me people aren't doing excel
| modeling through a laggy pipe
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Perhaps others have had better experience, but whenever I've used
| a remote GUI VM (e.g. through the Guacamole web browser
| interface), the latency is painfully noticeable when typing. So
| much so that I've usually dropped down to a local terminal
| connecting to the vm by ssh and doing everything in Emacs (or
| Vim, if that's how you're bent), or having JetBrains edit stuff
| remotely. But then you're back to needing a decent workstation.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Guacamole is excellent for managing servers, but hardly a
| reference implementation of remote access. The display protocol
| is getting shoehorned through a websocket and rendered into a
| browser canvas, whereas if you use Remmina or another native
| RDP client things have much less overhead.
| CarbonCycles wrote:
| Not a fan of cloud desktops or any "virtualized" desktop.
| Experience is typically subpar and the worst part is that it
| requires a stable internet connection. What's the point of that
| when many of us are working remote and mobile?
| symlinkk wrote:
| VSCode Remote SSH'd into a cloud desktop is superior to local
| development. With the hardware being remote you can afford to get
| something that's ultra fast and can run 24/7, and it still feels
| just as snappy and responsive as running it locally. I think this
| will be the standard for development within 3 years.
| lioeters wrote:
| I agree - for a few years my primary display has been
| permanently full-screen VSCode with Remote SSH, either to a
| remote server or a local virtual machine.
|
| Occasionally I open another window to edit files locally, but
| that's become rarer. I love having everything in a container
| that I can always destroy and recreate, or spin up as many as I
| want for isolated environments. It taught me to write
| automation scripts and configs for reproducible setups. It's
| perfect for education and onboarding new team members too.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its the latency that really gets me. Having all my text be
| delayed and having moving windows around be just painfully slow
| is annoying. Windows does a lot of tricks to hide desktop latency
| and that is with the CPUs right there and GPUs accelerating it. I
| have also run into lack of dedicated IO issues too that resulted
| in bad performance combined with CPU performance being subpar
| because cloud CPUs tend to be low frequency and a lot of desktop
| software depends on single thread performance still.
| GianFabien wrote:
| Give me a powerful workstation at work. Keep the laptop, I'm not
| doing extra work from home. Of course I have an even more tricked
| out system at home, but that's for playing games and working on
| my side-hustle.
| orloffm wrote:
| Cloud desktops were fine a few years ago in Windows 7 times when
| the desktop was 2D and was remoted as GDI instructions.
|
| Windows 10 made everything 3D, so now not having a GPU assigned
| to a virtual machine means everything is first rendered into a
| bitmap and then sent over wire as a movie. This causes additional
| delay, JPEG-like artifacts and instability.
| vegai_ wrote:
| Whoa, I thought they are absolutely pointless. Are they even
| worse?
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't know if I think they're pointless. The idea is
| reasonable, for some use cases. Personally I won't use a cloud
| desktop, or even remote desktop on a local LAN for any real
| work. Just the ever so small lag on remote desktops on a local
| network drives me absolutely nuts.
|
| The idea is pretty good, for light office work, but as it
| stands now, I wouldn't subject anyone to using Cloud desktops
| for any extended period of time.
|
| But the title is pretty confusing, when you think that cloud
| desktops are pretty terrible and now some one claims that they
| are even worse.
| opentokix wrote:
| Chocker
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Different workloads require different tools.
|
| I work with Rust and TypeScript projects - MBP M1 Pro 32Gb RAM is
| 110% enough.
| izacus wrote:
| The companies deploying cloud workstations usually want to save
| money and not pay for your 32GB MBP.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > aren't as good as you think
|
| Who thought they were any good in the first place?
| chatterhead wrote:
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's hard to take this seriously when it doesn't explore the why.
| Skimping on MacBooks is a pretty niche use case for cloud
| development.
|
| Imo security drives this decision, and being able Work remotely
| is the benefit.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| I would have agreed until I started working at Google. Also, you
| should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and instead use ssh
| + an editor that works with remote files.
|
| At Google we have a custom fork of VSCode running in browser and
| builds can either be distributed or run on my Linux VM to utilize
| build cache.
|
| I liked it so much I started doing a similar setup for small side
| projects. Just boot up the Cloud Console on GCP and start coding.
|
| Advantages are:
|
| - Accessible from anywhere (I use my pc, my laptop, etc. The env
| is always the same)
|
| - More compute (I can attach more CPU + more RAM flexibly)
|
| - Less friction to start (minimum environment setup, most tools
| are preinstalled)
|
| - Datacenter Network speeds + Artifacts cached (installing
| dependencies is fast)
|
| Disadvantages:
|
| - network dependence
|
| There are some adjustments that need to be made to your workflow.
| And for some applications you are dependent on having the correct
| tooling. However, my personal prediction is most companies will
| move to this type of development workflow as the tooling
| improves.
| ilaksh wrote:
| That's not a cloud desktop. It's a cool setup, but you framed
| your comment as a disagreement with the post. But you are
| actually agreeing.
| novok wrote:
| IMO you don't really need it to be a full vnc style remote
| desktop although, or even have the editor run in the browser.
| You can get equivalent results with bazel[0] remote execution +
| cache servers and get a similar horizontally scaling build
| system, without vnc style jank or full network dependence for
| your actions as a developer.
|
| Another reason why google likes the remote dev experience is
| because it doesn't download code to the developers laptop,
| because they don't trust them.
|
| [0] yes i know bazel / blaze is made by google
| flerchin wrote:
| It's not that it can't be done well, it's that it's not likely
| to be done well, especially at a large org.
| asdff wrote:
| There are many ways to approach this sort of thing. For example
| I work similarly, all code running on a powerful slurm-managed
| cluster that i can access using anything with ssh, but I just
| use stuff like tmux and cli editors that are already installed
| on the server rather than use a gui based editor. we have an
| lmod system with prebuilt packages of a lot of software we
| typically use with various versions represented, and we also
| use environmental managers such as conda/mamba and workflow
| control tools which are straightforward to use. Seems simple
| enough imo.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Also, you should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and
| instead use ssh + an editor that works with remote files.
|
| That's kinda stretching the definition of a 'desktop', isn't
| it? The sort of tasks someone uses Remote Desktop for seldom
| overlaps with what someone uses SSH for. Also it doesn't seem
| to be the point of the article:
|
| Article: > I'm also going to restrict this discussion to the
| case of "We run a full graphical environment on the VM, and
| stream that to the laptop"
| jdelman wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how much are you paying a month using Cloud
| Console that way?
| paxys wrote:
| Why would they be paying for it out of pocket?
| petercooper wrote:
| I don't know about Google, but as far as I heard, AWS folks
| pay for their own AWS resources for side projects, at
| least.
| rfoo wrote:
| Google too.
|
| Microsoft does give cloud credits per month for employees
| tho.
| [deleted]
| jdelman wrote:
| They said they were using it for side projects. Even if
| Google is subsidizing the bill, I'm interested to know how
| much something like this would cost.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Google does not provide any discounts for employees
| personal projects.
|
| Cloud Shell is free up to 5GB additional storage is
| $0.02/GB a month.
|
| Alternatively someone linked https://www.gitpod.io/ which
| also has a free tier.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| It's free tier. But storage is limited to 5GB.
|
| I'm pretty sure you can pay for more storage but I just
| haven't hit the limit yet.
| kfajdsl wrote:
| This is exactly the alternative that was presented at the end
| of the post. He was specifically against remote desktops.
| danans wrote:
| Remote desktops can work great if you constrain and structure
| what you do in them.
|
| For me, this means not using traditional desktop environments
| like gnome/kde/windows/macos, but instead a full screen tiled
| window manager (i3 in my case) with different virtual
| desktops assigned to different work items.
|
| Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE (vim in
| my case) and a terminal session for the code under
| development in that IDE. That's it. No silly weather or chat
| widgets (all that lives in my local laptop's traditional
| desktop).
|
| The result is I never have to search for a dev task related
| tab or be unsure if the code I'm running is the code I'm
| editing (which can happen if you are working on many
| concurrent changes).
|
| I liken the setup to the keyboard-driven text terminals you
| still see in some shops, hotels, and airport check-in desks.
|
| In general, I think smartly crafting your workflow matters a
| great deal more than the particular tool you might use.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE
| (vim in my case) and a terminal session for the code under
| development in that IDE. That's it. No silly weather or
| chat widgets (all that lives in my local laptop's
| traditional desktop).
|
| I don't disagree, but if your editor is vim and you
| run/test in a terminal, why not do the whole thing in tmux
| in SSH?
| danans wrote:
| > you run/test in a terminal
|
| Some of the software has a GUI, and some of the tools
| (i.e. unit test runners) display their output in a
| locally (to the remote desktop) running web app viewed
| via a browser.
|
| If I were doing strictly text-based work, I might use
| tmux, but to be honest i3 scales down so well to the
| text-only use case that I probably wouldn't bother, since
| there is no upside to doing so.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| For tools with webapp output. You can use a proxy to
| access it in your local browser.
|
| Something like ngrok would work well.
|
| The advantage of having tools with APIs
| danans wrote:
| Sure, but it's a lot easier just to open a browser in the
| remote desktop session. It's not like the FPS of the
| browser matters much when looking at unit test results.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Somehow I missed it at the end. However, he mentions the code
| still being present on the local env and only doing builds in
| the cloud.
|
| I'm more in the camp of the code living in the cloud,
| building in the cloud, executing in the cloud.
|
| You're editor running locally providing a view of the code.
| Which requires some specific tooling.
|
| As always theres a sliding scale here and people need to
| decide what works best for their use case.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I'm more in the camp of the code living in the cloud,
| building in the cloud, executing in the cloud.
|
| Until you see how slow it is and you regret it.
| asdff wrote:
| On the 'cloud' (really our own cluster) we use at work
| most of the nodes have 16 cores and 128gb of memory, its
| a much beefier system than what is available locally.
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| Damn, when you said Google I thought you were gonna talk about
| Cloudtop, etc. +1 to your recommendation, but they do a pretty
| good job Cloudtop too(for non-power users it is pretty usable).
|
| Also check out https://www.mightyapp.com/
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Yeah, to be clear for Google work I am talking about the
| combination of Cloudtop (VM), Cider (IDE), Blaze/Bazel
| (Builds).
|
| In addition you also need a version control / file sync
| system.
|
| It's also nice to have some kind of network proxy especially
| if you are doing web dev. Tools or web services run on the VM
| and you just access it directly through the proxy on your
| local browser.
|
| The integration/combination of these is what allows things to
| work.
|
| For personal code this is Google Cloud Console. You can
| actually just jump into it . It has a built in VS Code
| editor.
|
| But at home it would be GCP VM + VS Code + Git.
|
| GCP also has built in proxy. The only problem I have had so
| far is it doesn't rewrite URL's which can be an issue for web
| apps. I think it's solveable I just haven't really tried yet.
|
| Theres some other solutions in the other comments as well.
| cbHXBY1D wrote:
| You also should mention the use of CitC. With CitC, I can
| build/write code from my work machine at the office and
| then go home and gmosh into a cloudtop that uses the same
| network mounted filesystem.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Yep, I sorta glossed over it with file sync. But I guess
| CitC is more than that. Its more like a workspace sync.
|
| It acts like a view of the monorepo and holds whatever
| changes you make. Additionally it integrates with your
| version control and holds its state as well. For example
| any local commits or branches.
|
| And this can all be accessed from the browser or the CLI
| on any connected machine.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I thought network filesystems were a terrible idea until
| I used citc + piper, really two incredible pieces of
| engineering infra. So many problems are reduced to just
| writing files to disk if you have a magically disk that
| acts like it is infinitely sized and everywhere all at
| once with low latency and versioned by the second.
| Whatever promotions they offered those authors and
| maintainers, and whatever black magic they had to invoke,
| it really was worth it.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > Accessible from anywhere (I use my pc, my laptop, etc. The
| env is always the same)
|
| This is a feature in search of a problem for me. I never wake
| up in the morning and go "Gee only if I can code on random
| computers".
|
| It sounds super nice but then I think about it a little more
| and it's just fluff.
| paxys wrote:
| This is a very useful feature the moment you have > 1
| development machine. Complex build environments,
| dependencies, personal preferences all syncing seamlessly
| between all of them is a godsend.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I already do that in pycharm. Everything else needs to be
| set once. But you're actually arguing about multi-machines
| and I'm arguing about "code from anywhere" even on
| computers that don't belong to you. That is an overblown
| feature that I'd never use.
|
| Latency is top priority for me. It shall not be sacrificed
| for any multi machine inconveniences.
| mox1 wrote:
| What happens when your machine breaks / stops working /
| gets stolen?
|
| Is your pycharm config and setup backed up properly? Is
| your pycharm config versioned?
|
| How do you manage credentials / secrets?
|
| How often do you update pycharm? Does this updating
| require any refactoring?
|
| How do you build (locally? remotely?)
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Latency is top priority for me.
|
| VSCode is super popular and performant. It runs in a
| browser (electron) natively. Running it in chrome
| remotely is literally no different if you have a
| performant network.
|
| I always found VSCode to perform better than IDEA based
| tools fwiw, especially if you want to keep a laptop on
| battery. Latency has never been an issue.
| arcbyte wrote:
| I have a website with a worker process doing RSS parsing that
| occasionally fails. It would be quite nice to be able to
| spend 10 minutes fixing trivial bugs from my phone while I'm
| out and about. Or from my iPad. I'm not doing feature
| development but this would be nice to have for things that
| are so easy I could do them now but instead must wait hours
| or days until I'm back in front of my dev machine.
|
| And actually I have a desktop and a laptop that I do dev work
| on. More than once I've started a branch on the desktop one
| night but don't quite get far enough to push it up and the
| next day I take my laptop to the coffee shop and realize the
| code is still at home.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I mean there are always going to be niche uses for this.
|
| My point is about corporations adopting this sort of a
| thing because executives got sold on a fancy feature
| "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes
| it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere
| but have to suffer latency the entire time.
|
| It sounds _so damn good on paper_ vs. reality.
| arcbyte wrote:
| As a director in a previous job a few years ago I almost
| introduced apache eclipse orion to our organization
| strictly to reduce issues with onboarding and junior
| devs.
|
| I love when senior devs can set up their workspace how
| they like, but juniors and onboarders often need lots of
| handholding. Being able to spin up an IDE with exactly
| what they need with zero effort is incredibly valuable.
| We lost days and days of productivity because some
| developers didn't understand how to manage having both a
| jre and jdk on their machine.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from
| anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of
| the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to
| suffer latency the entire time.
|
| This isn't the pitch. Not at all. The pitch is "no code
| (or IP) on local machines that can be stolen" and "no
| downtime if laptop breaks... IT desk can keep a stack of
| chrome books ready for backup". Combined with something
| like gmail and google docs, the laptop at some employees
| WFH house contains no business secrets ever.
|
| I've never experienced the slightest drag of latency with
| this approach. If you're running a compiled language, the
| compiler is surely the bottleneck. If you're doing it for
| work, they'll probably set it up so it's always
| regionalized close to you from a cloud. Maybe fly.io
| should pitch this.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| I think this is it. As soon as you go from working on one
| computer to 2 you do have this problem.
|
| I myself work on 2 laptops and a desktop all running
| different OS.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| It's probably the minority, but I think there are people who
| it's helpful for.
|
| For example, I travel with an iPad Pro and a work laptop. If
| I want to tinker one evening, I can use my iPad instead of
| bringing a personal laptop. (This also applies to cloud
| gaming for some people, but I haven't done that personally).
|
| My partner is also a software engineer and we have a toy
| server at home with various things running in it (eg game
| server, home assistant, vpn etc). We have a VSCode instance
| running so either of us can grab a browser and update the
| configs, without deal with being in sync. (Imo this is the
| "most obvious" use case - modifying remote files without
| worrying about sync).
|
| At work, I also have this setup. (My school had something
| similar too, just less polished because it was a while ago)
| The benefits there are big too. Besides everything mentioned
| before, it also means that there's basically zero setup time.
| If you break your laptop, or forget it, or whatever, IT just
| hands you a temporary chrome book which you log into your
| work from a browser.
|
| By comparison, my old job pushed a bad MacOS update that
| bricked my work computer, and they made me remote into a
| windows VM (AWS workspace) from my personal laptop to do work
| until a replacement arrived. I lost all my work/files/etc
| since it bricked unexpectedly, and that job had remote Linux
| VMs so I had two levels of indirection. Then I had to set
| everything up again, so I easily lost 3+ weeks of work due to
| that incident.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| There is one more point I would like to add to the "less
| friction to start." This is the killer feature for education.
|
| No more do students have to set up their own envs. Figure out
| PYTHONPATH. No more do educators need to debug installation
| issues on 3 different OSes.
|
| Teachers distribute a pre setup env which they know works for
| what they are trying to teach. Students go straight into
| writing code and building things with minimum friction.
|
| Learning to set up your env can be punted to a problem for
| later.
| asdff wrote:
| env management is pretty easy considering tools like conda
| are out there, that will carry you pretty far especially in
| terms of education. you could create a conda env specific for
| your class and just email the yaml. its also easy to write a
| script that will install miniconda and build these needed
| environments
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Teacher here. This is absolutely correct. I can't imagine
| teaching CS, especially at a high school level without
| Replit.
| ctoth wrote:
| Learning to set up my environment to compile my first MUD
| back in 1999 was my first introduction to Autotools,
| ./configure, make, etc. I was motivated to solve the problem
| because I wanted to tinker. I'm sure someone will say I'm
| gatekeeping, but seriously these low-level skills have served
| me my entire career, and I wonder what happens when every dev
| environment is just a docker pull away. Who learns how to
| build new environments?
|
| That said, I have recently been tinkering with the
| Flipperzero firmware, and compared to the old Rockbox days
| when you had to install an arm-elf-gcc toolchain yourself and
| pray, embedded development has gotten way easier and this
| doesn't seem like a bad thing. I don't have an answer, just
| something to think about!
| bombcar wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm here completely able to build basically
| anything from source but for some reason unable to
| understand docker at all.
| [deleted]
| vlan0 wrote:
| >Who learns how to build new environments?
|
| Feels like this is happening already. There is no incentive
| to learn the fundamental concepts. We need more people
| interested in the why, and not just a quick buck. Folks
| interested in the why is the only reason we are here to
| begin with!
|
| On the other hand....it's great job security! Less and less
| people understand networking everyday it seems!
| mikebenfield wrote:
| The kinds of things people are talking about - fiddling
| with autotools or PYTHONPATH - are not "fundamental
| concepts" or "the why" behind anything. It's just
| tedious, boring nonsense. There are plenty of
| intellectually curious people who would be turned off by
| this stuff.
| vlan0 wrote:
| I agree.
| bckr wrote:
| In my experience, "tinkering" with an environment before
| getting any code working was a recipe for believing "this
| is too hard, maybe I'm not smart enough to do this".
|
| Getting a feedback loop early on is so important. Once
| you're convinced that you can write software, setting up
| an environment starts to look like a tractable problem.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > wonder what happens when every dev environment is just a
| docker pull away
|
| They learn later, when/if they actually need it. And for
| those who turn out to be unwilling or unable, well, there
| wasn't much chance they'd have taken the same path as you,
| anyway.
|
| Speaking of paths, specifically path dependence, autotools
| and friends really are monstrosities and should rightfully
| be relegated to history. I hope that simpler, easier
| environment building really are the future, as you hinted.
| WWLink wrote:
| In my experience, it would become "You're not allowed to
| deviate from the standard environment" lol.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Its not necessarily gatekeeping, its just assuming that all
| others who come through are also motivated in the same way
| you are. Reality is that the same experience likely
| discouraged countless others and prevented them from
| pursuing development.
|
| I'm the same as you, but I recognize not everyone is.
| lmm wrote:
| > Autotools, ./configure, make, etc. I was motivated to
| solve the problem because I wanted to tinker. I'm sure
| someone will say I'm gatekeeping, but seriously these low-
| level skills have served me my entire career
|
| What skills? 95% of using autotools etc. is tedious
| memorization or copy-paste, not something you learn
| anything useful from.
| madrox wrote:
| Think of it like a product funnel. If the goal is to get
| people to learn X, making them learn Y as a barrier first
| is unnecessary. You risk people abandoning the funnel that
| way. It's still entirely possible to learn these tools some
| other way.
| Kamq wrote:
| Yes, but if learning X beforehand required learning Y,
| then we might be expecting the value of learning X to be
| the combined value of learning X + Y.
|
| It should be noted when adopting this approach, that
| you're lowering the expected value from the people who
| make it through the funnel. This may be counteracted by
| more people making it through the funnel, or it may not.
| The delta in total value is completely unknown.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| I think the problem here is ordering. At the end we
| probably want them to know X and Y but we would rather
| they learn X then Y.
|
| But to learn X they need to do some steps from Y.
|
| If we can remove those steps we can make more people
| learn both.
|
| But also in practice I don't think anyone struggling to
| set up their env before writing a line of code is
| learning much. They are just following arcane
| instructions until it works.
| conductr wrote:
| Those who make it through the funnel with only X are
| likely more than the X+Y scenario simply because it's
| less learning and new concepts so drop out will be
| reduced. This cohort are probably more likely to go on to
| learn Y if we further assume it was so valuable as to
| have been "required". In reality requiring X+Y backfires
| as step 1 because X is all they want and X may be worth
| 10Y to the student at step 1. The value of Y may increase
| to >X after learning X.
|
| When I learned basic HTML, CSS and JS. On step 1, JS had
| essentially no value. CSS sounded like it had value but
| was a bit nebulous and optional sounding. HTML seemed
| like an obvious requirement for building a website, so
| that's where I started. Once I learned HTML, the value of
| CSS became obvious and I pursued it. JS still seemed
| esoteric but later once I got HTML/CSS down and wanted to
| do more JS kept coming up as the solution. So I learned
| it too. Now, I'd say JS is way more valuable to me than
| HTML/CSS even though I learned it last.
|
| This was in the 90s BTW and the path wasn't very clear
| back then. The first book I bought was actually a Perl
| book and quickly realized it was too advanced of a place
| for me to start. I learned about Perl after noticing the
| /cgi-bin/ portion of URLs and wondering what that meant.
| It had to be something most sites where doing similarly.
| This was before Google so whatever random SE I used back
| then told me cgi-bin was associated with Perl scripting
| for web development. I continued to struggle with the
| backend stuff (JS was FE only back then) until PHP3 came
| around. I'm self taught if that wasn't clear.
| hulitu wrote:
| > There is one more point I would like to add to the "less
| friction to start." This is the killer feature for education
|
| So now the children have 2 entities spying on them: the
| school and the cloud provider.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| Huh? It's not like the children aren't using Google and
| Microsoft services by the truckload already. Every single
| one has Android/iOs phone. They use Gmail and YouTube and
| browse the web. And the schools use it too - MS Windows,
| Office, Google Classroom, Drive... Practically nothing
| changes with a cloud desktop.
| WWLink wrote:
| You mean a fully locked down device that allows no
| tinkering at all. Then they graduate to college and
| they're again suggested to use a fully locked down
| environment with no tinkering at all.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| Can't speak about Apple devices but there's more than
| enough tinkering available on Android.
| WWLink wrote:
| > No more do students have to set up their own envs.
|
| That straight up sounds dystopian though. Speaking as someone
| who makes software for Linux machines, I'd really hate to
| hire someone that doesn't know how to play around with the OS
| side of things.
|
| Handing someone a pre-built dev environment and playing god
| with them sounds like a great way to get stupid programmers
| who can't architect.
| pradn wrote:
| The flip side of this is that it's hard to do anything beyond
| the standard library for some languages. Using PythonAnywhere
| is great for std-in/std-out programs, but I couldn't figure
| out a way to import graphics libraries and such. The web is
| pretty limiting when teaching with anything other than
| JS/HTML/CSS.
| samirsd wrote:
| very cool! do you have a good guide you could share for setting
| that up?
| mox1 wrote:
| If you don't want to set it all up yourself, GitPod basically
| has this up and running, with a pretty generous free tier.
| Think VSCode in the browser, with a docker container
| (controlled by you!) bash prompt at the bottom.
|
| https://gitpod.io/
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Here is the product https://cloud.google.com/shell
|
| It has a quick start guide and docs.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What languages does that setup support in Google? JS/TS I guess
| obviously.
|
| How do I replicate it with self-host? What keywords should I
| google?
| pradn wrote:
| There's not really a way around network dependence when coding
| at Google. You're not allowed to have code copied to a laptop,
| unless you get special permissions. Only teams that work on
| client code like desktop apps are likely to be given access. So
| this means to even look at code, you have to be connected to
| the network (via Chrome or a Fuse-based VFS.)
|
| If you're using a desktop, there's not really a case for going
| offline, so being dependent on the network is ok.
|
| I get nearly all my work done off a laptop, but I do find its
| weak CPU/memory a mismatch for my heavy use of Chrome.
| netfortius wrote:
| A combination of AWS Workspaces and Appstream solutions worked
| fine for us, with a few hundred developers and data scientists,
| spread all over the world, as FTEs (for the first category of
| products) and contractors on various continents (for the latter),
| including some M&As we conducted and continue to undergo, which
| require(d) very short time to bringing new teams up to speed.
| fideloper wrote:
| I think I found a good remote dev environment recently -
| basically "just use Mutagen to sync files to a server close to
| you". That keeps the source of truth (code files) local but
| outsources the compute.
|
| I started working at Fly.io ~4mo ago and quickly realized I could
| setup a nice remote dev environment since there are regions close
| to me (super low latency).
|
| I setup a VM to run SSH to sync/forward ports. It turn off when
| I'm not using it (after a configured timeout, it sniffs for SSH
| connections and exits if there are none - which stops the VM),
| and uses Mutagen to sync files. The source of truth is my local
| files, so my local IDE's work great (they're working against the
| local file system).
|
| I wrapped it up in a little tool I'm calling Vessel
| https://github.com/Vessel-App/vessel-cli, which talks to Fly's
| "Machines API"
| taylorius wrote:
| I find it hard to imagine they're less good than I think.
| NexRebular wrote:
| Makes me miss SunRay... it just worked
| cdkmoose wrote:
| This also requires access to a stable fast network at all times.
| Local internet goes down, AWS/AZURE/GCP goes down and I'm stuck.
| With my laptop setup, I can work anywhere anytime, as long as I
| have power. I'll need network access at some point to commit code
| or pick up changed libraries, but that can be managed.
| anxiously wrote:
| Maybe that is not a bad thing? If you don't have internet then
| go for a walk. Touch some grass.
|
| I hope always being in a work state isn't seen as a plus.
| cdkmoose wrote:
| I can work remote from Maine for a week with limited internet
| access. I'm not working any extra, I'm just choosing what
| environment I want to work in.
| lupire wrote:
| With my laptop, I can work before, during, or after touching
| grass, instead of taking a long wasteful commute.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Multiple times I've caught coworkers starting a gotomeeting/zoom
| meeting in their VDI and they can't figure out why they can't use
| their LOCAL USB conference microphone/speaker array.
|
| Yet another use case where VDI falls down.
| easton wrote:
| Most of the video conferencing apps of choice have a version
| where they run something on the thin client to reduce latency
| (going from the thin client to Zoom or Teams or WebEx directly
| instead of through the VDI). They have support for the mics and
| stuff too.
|
| https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/sections/4404192199053-Virt...
| Maxburn wrote:
| Interesting, I wasn't aware of that.
|
| I just copy the link and bring it to the computer I'm using
| to open directly there.
| bluedino wrote:
| I've been using this in one form or another for a very long time.
| Starting when we had Windows desktops with bad Linux support, and
| back then you couldn't run both OS's on the same machine at the
| same time.
|
| So I stuck a workstation with Linux on it in a closet. Fired up
| VNC and I could hit it from home, my cubicle, the road, wherever.
| It's evolved over the years as things became faster and more
| secure. It became a co-located server, then a VPS, and now it's a
| shared setup on a beefy server.
|
| It maintains it's state no matter where I go. I can open up two
| ore more sessions for two ore more monitors. But it's more useful
| to just surf the web or open PDF's or whatever on the local
| machine. Copy and paste is pretty seamless these days. And
| wherever it's located, has a much better network connection than
| I do.
|
| You still have a latency problem with large files (CD .iso in the
| old days, a 10GB package these days). I don't play games so I
| don't really know how that goes. But for development it works
| great, as well as just a general workstation.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I wouldn't think cloud desktops would be good at all, so if
| they're not as good as I'd think... they must be pretty darn bad.
| [deleted]
| hansel_der wrote:
| i feel like not much has improved when working with teamviewer or
| anydesk over using x11-forwarding (plain and with compression) or
| vnc derivatives
|
| remindes of an old document by stuart cheshire
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| It'd be nice if the author mentioned what cloud desktops and how
| good people think they are. Don't tell me it's worse than I think
| without specifying what you think I think!
|
| I know numerous gaming companies that swear by Parsec. Except the
| author doesn't appear to be talking about Parsec tier cloud
| desktops. But then again it's not clear what the author is
| talking about
| thesh4d0w wrote:
| Yep, we have remote developers using parsec with unreal engine,
| maya, 3ds, etc.
|
| Author seems to be stuck in the tech mindset of 5 years ago.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Cloud desktops are not a cure-all, but they do have their uses. I
| have "cloud" desktops hosted in my home (on a NUC server) and
| also on cheap VPS instances, depending on my particular needs,
| whether that be an isolated environment for dangerous work, or
| just having a portable desktop that I can connect to from
| whatever device I have at hand, continuing from where I last left
| off.
|
| GPU-intensive desktops are pretty much a no-go, but Mate desktop
| works beautifully and does what a desktop should: Manage my
| environment and get the hell out of my way.
|
| Browsing on the remote desktop is anything but smooth, but it's
| good enough for development. I'm not going to stream video on it,
| though.
|
| There's a tiny bit of keystroke latency, but not enough to matter
| IMO. I'm using Chrome remote desktop so YMMV. Running Steam on a
| cloud desktop is possible, but it's an exercise in madness.
|
| I do it all using LXD to keep things relatively distro agnostic.
| I've posted the Python script I use here:
| https://github.com/kstenerud/lxc-launch
| martinald wrote:
| The later versions of RDP is miles ahead of any other remote
| desktop protocol in my experience. I used to use it for gaming
| years ago (from Windows machine to Mac) - it really isn't that
| bad if latency and bandwidth is acceptable.
|
| As others say, it is very hard sometimes to detect what is local
| and what isn't with RDP. Everything seems to just work, even
| using the Mac client.
|
| Compare this with everything else I've used and it's a real janky
| JPEG compression mess.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| RDP is indeed highly performant, but the experience may highly
| depends on the latency.
|
| I'm working daily in a nanofabrication center and routinely RDP
| to workstations running Windows Server from computers with 12
| years old i5 (which is supposed to be single purpose for tool
| billing). I wrote code with VSCode and Matlab, view GDS with
| KLayout, run ANSYS and COMSOL. Everything works so well even
| with all the 3D, despite of the ancientness of the terminal
| computer. However this depends on a decent LAN with a <1 ms
| ping delay (physical distance ~500 m)...
|
| When working at home through VPN, the experience degraded to
| fluent but with seldomly noticeable latency. And when using the
| shitty public wifi at train station, then every keystroke take
| a noticeable time to echo...
| rcarmo wrote:
| Turn it down to 16 bit color in those situations.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| This is where I wish Plan 9 had caught on. It lets you run remote
| graphical apps more seamlessly than any remote desktop I know of
| today.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| better than X11 did? better than Display Postscript did?
|
| (genuinely wondering since i've not had a chance to play with
| Plan 9, kinda randomly)
| ryukafalz wrote:
| X forwarding involves granting the remote system access to
| your X socket, which is very powerful. I don't know for sure
| that Plan 9's model avoids this (I've only had small chances
| here and there to play with Plan 9), but given its heavy use
| of namespacing I suspect it's at least possible.
|
| Performance-wise X forwarding was always pretty slow for me
| in a way that Plan 9 seems to avoid, though I've gathered it
| used to be more efficient prior to modern graphical toolkits
| that want to draw a bunch of bitmaps to the screen. It's
| possible they were more evenly matched in the past.
|
| Not sure about Display Postscript, never had a chance to try
| that one.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Display Postscript was really great, and X11R5 at least was
| super snappy, predates the Motif and other window managers
| slightly, I think. But i also would use super fast window
| managers and usually not be pushing bitmaps all over.
| leoh wrote:
| I've been developing for the last few years on a cloud VM and
| love it. Latency has never been a serious issue for me.
|
| It lets me use Linux as my daily driver, I have a highly capable
| machine with large L2/L3 cache, a lot of RAM, many CPUs -- and
| it's totally portable.
|
| Not to mention that the internet speeds on the cloud VM are
| incredible -- easily 1gbps+ wherever I am in the world. This is a
| selling point folks forget.
|
| The combination of speed (hardware and network) and always being
| on (can leave compilation tasks etc. running) is very nice.
|
| I've used Citrix and the modern Chrome Remote Desktop experience
| is generally an order of magnitude better.
|
| Working on a bus with wifi, typically fine. Even working from
| Asia with the VM in California, great.
|
| The only issue I have with cloud is that for personal it's
| expensive. Google compute VMs are a lot more than equivalent
| workstations per year for similar hardware afaict.
|
| That's the question I'm curious how folks work around.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| I've done this for a long while, and I always come back to the
| only two viable competitors in the space (that don't require
| enterprise licensing).
|
| Nomachine and ThinLinc.
|
| Everything else is fine for the occasional remote desktop
| administration, but they all have a combination of bad video
| quality, no audio, no keyboard shortcut capture or bad scaling
| options.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You should really try xorgxrdp. It is now part of most modern
| distros, has good audio support, and excellent video quality (I
| can watch YouTube on a Pi running Remmina, using nothing but
| stock OS packages on both client and server).
|
| One catch is that some distros (like Fedora), for some reason
| use the Xvnc backend to xrdp by default, which is idiotic. Just
| go into xrdp.ini and enable the Xorg section (get rid of the
| Xvnc one) to get things to work properly.
|
| I personally cannot abide NoMachine (it was a spectacular
| fiddly failure for me many times, especially on Mac and Windows
| clients) and never found ThinLinc to beat the simplicity of
| RDP, especially considering the client software (I have very
| configurable RDP clients like Jump Desktop for iOS and Android
| that work perfectly with Bluetooth mice and keyboards, so I
| seldom pack a laptop these days).
| [deleted]
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Does it work out of the box? multiple screens? doest it work
| ok with subpar connections, like 4G? Just asking, didn't know
| about it.
|
| Currentry using Linux Mint, I guess I could try.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yep. Once you edit the xrdp.ini file to enable the Xorg
| backend (which I've done recently on Fedora 36 and Ubuntu
| LTS), you're good.
|
| Multiple screen support depends on your client, I've had no
| issues with Windows and Mac clients. Audio depends a lot on
| your server distro (clients have it all sorted). Fedora
| uses pipewire, so YMMV.
|
| When using mobile connections I trim it down to 16-bit
| color and it is perfectly usable, although if you're doing
| that all the time I'd also remove wallpaper and shadows (I
| prefer using something like XFCE when doing that -
| https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330).
| sascha_sl wrote:
| I had to switch back to Pulseaudio and compile the audio
| plugin for XRDP myself (that was on Fedora 35).
| rcarmo wrote:
| You're probably right about that. My Fedora container is
| 36 upgraded from 35, so I might have done that a while
| back and never looked back.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Looks good, I'll try, thanks.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I happen to agree with NoMachine, specially because it actually
| supports transporting X rendering commands, which is still
| miles better than transferring video (and you can have e.g. 8K
| resolutions without requiring a server farm for encoding).
|
| I also like that they allow rootless mode (i.e. without the
| desktop), which can of solves the problem of "local browser,
| remote desktop" that TFA is complaining about. Local windows
| are practically indistinguishable from remote ones.
|
| Many of this also applies to X2Go/FreeNX, albeit it seems to be
| a bit more regression-prone.
| pavon wrote:
| Looks like I'm in the minority here. I use a VMWare Horizon VM as
| my primary desktop environment, and I love it! Working from home,
| VMWare Horizon has much better performance than using a VPN for
| many things including X11 forwarding to Linux computers on-site,
| RDP to Windows computers on-site, and accessing CIFS/SMB file
| shares. And when I do go on-site, I can connect to it from any
| computer, either using a kiosk, or a colleague's computer if we
| are collaborating, or any conference room computer.
| olliecornelia wrote:
| I thought they'd be pretty fuckin bad, you're telling me they're
| worse than that?
| gw99 wrote:
| Yep. Having worked in these environments, this solution is almost
| always sold to companies that are working around shitty hard to
| reproduce software stacks, staff trust issues, scale up
| difficulties and checkbox security cargo cults. The resulting
| outcome is usually increased staff turnover, increased cost and
| decreased productivity. Most of this they are having trouble
| rationalising or acknowledging still.
|
| You don't want to work for those companies.
|
| It's notably different if you have a cloud VM running linux and
| you're connecting to it with VScode or something over SSH. That's
| borderline acceptable. The reality is usually some horrible AWS,
| Azure or Citrix portalised solution however.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Absolutely same experience here. The pay is often nice because
| they also have difficulties to attract developers. Absolutely
| not worth it in my opinion.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > issues, scale up difficulties and checkbox security cargo
| cults.
|
| > You don't want to work for those companies
|
| I can't defend the likes of Citrix but I've been the guy who
| has to tell an intern on their last day to hand over the flash
| drive with code we know they copied over the day before.
| Sometimes avoiding those issues is easier.
|
| Also weird tech stacks are a real issue (but there are lots of
| developer-native tools for the job).
|
| > It's notably different if you have a cloud VM running linux
| and you're connecting to it with VScode or something over SSH.
| That's borderline acceptable. The reality is usually some
| horrible AWS, Azure or Citrix portalised solution however.
|
| 100% agree. VSCode and VM is my only accepted solution now.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| RDP works fine for Windows honestly, but in Linux the only
| decent solution is nomachine and sometimes not even that.
|
| Anyway, in my company they decided to hand us out a company
| laptop and connect through VPN to the corporate network, with
| shared drives, and it's the best solution IMO.
| rcarmo wrote:
| See my other comment regarding xorgxrdp.
| gw99 wrote:
| I worked over RDP for a couple of years. It's not terrible
| but it's not too good either. You pretty much have to have a
| wired Internet connection and there are still problems with
| Alt+Tab and high DPI displays.
|
| That's a reasonable compromise from your org. Good on them. I
| was suffering with corporate OneDrive. Fortunately everything
| I do ends up in git anyway so I just turned it off and don't
| use it.
| ale42 wrote:
| I work almost daily with RDP when I'm working from home,
| and I have to say that most of the time I almost can't tell
| if I'm on the remote machine (I'm working full screen) or
| on the local one. Unless I'm playing a video or use a
| graphically-heavy application. But it is very true what a
| good wired connection is needed (at least 100 Mbps, with
| low latency ~15 ms). Tried this on a LTE connection (a few
| Mbps and quite some latency >150ms), and it's a pain.
| pbronez wrote:
| OneDrive and SharePoint have been mostly ok for me... but
| there are real limits. They're fine for a large number of
| medium sized files that you collaborate on with a handful
| of people. But then when you have a 100MB PowerPoint with a
| dozen contributors it falls over and can't get up. I'm so
| annoyed they killed Slide Library...
| clarge1120 wrote:
| It's a miserable experience from top to bottom. Onboarding a
| new developer takes much longer and is far more tedious than
| one might expect. There are multiple layers of security
| employees must navigate. And when something breaks, anywhere,
| it's a huge pain to sort out the source of the problem, find
| the right person responsible, and get something fixed.
|
| If you find yourself in an organization that thinks this remote
| desktop environment is a great idea, do yourself a favor, if
| you can, and leave. You'll give other devs more incentive to
| push back and make this a thing of the past, like "thin
| clients".
| lupire wrote:
| Huh? If your corporate resources are synced to your laptop,
| you have no security.
| tinodb wrote:
| > But even a fast laptop is slower than a decent workstation, and
| if your developers want a local build environment they're
| probably going to want a decent workstation. They'll want a fast
| (and expensive) laptop as well, though, because they're not going
| to carry their workstation home with them and obviously you
| expect them to be able to work from home.
|
| What kind of builds require more than one of the new MacBook
| Pro's?
|
| And what about using cloud _development environments_ instead of
| a fully remote desktop? I haven't properly tested GitHub
| Codespaces, but it seems to me that a lightweight laptop (ie
| cheapest MB Air, if Apple) with MDM plus codespaces can work
| really well.
|
| Sure, not everyone is using these tools, but to state that devs
| in general need both a beefy workstation _and_ a laptop sounds a
| bit outlandish to me.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| I work on a C++ project where a(n x86) Pro takes over an hour
| to build the universe. And that is less work than a browser or
| compiler.
| jcalabro wrote:
| For the past 5 years I've used a macbook to ssh in to a Linux VM
| as my development environment. It was great for the work that I
| was doing (distributed web systems).
|
| Now that I've changed jobs and I'm developing a desktop app
| again, I'm back on a physical Linux box under my desk, and I
| really miss the old experience. It was great to never care about
| a mac change tanking your productivity (i.e. I was totally
| unperturbed by the m1 switch), and it was also great not to have
| to run a Linux desktop environment, which it turns out is still a
| big pain.
| ricardou wrote:
| I have had the same experience, although I've only been out of
| school for two years. So far my daily work stream has me doing
| ssh to a Linux box and then doing my work there. All the CI/CD,
| version control, building code, and storing the code is done
| remotely.
|
| So far it's been great (again, I've never had an alternative)
| and the power of virtualization has really come in handy. A
| couple of times in the past I accidentally borked my Linux box
| and started to figure out how to fix it, but then I had my d'oh
| moment: just scrap this one and get another!
|
| There's no "it works on my machine" and most importantly, I can
| work from anywhere, with a stable internet connection (even
| using a phone to do USB tethering worked fine), from a Mac, a
| Chromebook, windows, whatever computer.
|
| One caveat is that I program backends in C++ so a lot of the
| issues mentioned in the article don't really apply to me.
| Regardless, it's been great!
| rcarmo wrote:
| Funny that I should be reading this on such a "cloud" desktop.
|
| I have a Raspberry Pi[1] running Remmina and accessing a number
| of different machines via RDP - A personal Fedora 36 desktop
| running in an LXC container[2], a Windows VM on Azure, and
| various other similar environments. I am typing this on that Pi,
| through that Fedora session, pushed to a 2560x1080 display.
| Typing and typical browsing is almost indistinguishable from
| "being there". Coding too. It is only noticeable (on the Pi) when
| large parts of the screen update and the little thing has to chug
| along, but I'd rather have this completely silent setup than an
| Intel NUC.
|
| For work, I do have spanking new a work-issue laptop, but it is
| fairly recent and the fans spin up whenever I launch anything of
| consequence, so I am still logging in to a virtual desktop
| environment for everything up to (and including) audio calls (RDP
| has pretty decent audio support these days). Video and display
| sharing I still do locally, mostly because it's usual to switch
| environments during a call, but I have full multiple display
| support, and the connection can handle my 5K2K and 4K displays
| just fine.
|
| I've been doing this for a decade or so, ever since I could use
| Citrix over GPRS. The user experience is fantastic - even at that
| time I could literally close my session in the evening, take a
| morning flight to Milan, pop open my laptop and continue where I
| had left off, over a piddling sub-64Kbps link.
|
| With the right setup (and experience), latency issues mostly
| vanish. These days you can push a full 3D rendered desktop over
| DSL with either optimized RDP or game streaming, so the real
| constraints typically come from IT restrictions and people
| wanting to micromanage their environments.
|
| That said, I also use VS Code Remote, and it works great for me
| as well over SSH. But it's just easier to spin up a VM/container
| and do that from my iPad :)
|
| [1] - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/08/14/2030 [2] -
| https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/02/2130
|
| Edit: Remembered I shot this video of it running over Wi-Fi,
| unoptimized:
| https://twitter.com/rcarmo/status/1561397639215665153?s=20&t...
| simfoo wrote:
| Nothing beats working directly on a fast but quiet workstation
| sitting next to my table.
|
| At least for me, the productivity gains associated with quicker
| builds, IDE resyncs (CLion, looking at you) or just being able to
| have email, chat, calendar and an active video conference running
| without making the system crawl to a halt or long latency spikes
| are huge. 3-4k for a machine that will likely last 2-3 years is
| nothing in comparison.
| asdff wrote:
| Having access to a cluster certainly beats having a local
| workstation imo. Why settle for 1 node when you can have many?
| scarface74 wrote:
| What type of laptop are you use to using where that would make
| your computer crawl? I have none of those issues with my
| current M1 MacBook Pro 16inch.
|
| I have never heard the fan on my current MacBook. Now my older
| x86 one is a different story.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| For the life of me I don't understand why folks default to
| laptops for development. Yes portability is great, but most of
| us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. If I'm going to
| be out of the office (away from home) I take a laptop and
| remote into the desktop! Even M1 macs (I have one and love it),
| while powerful, just can't hold a candle to a workstation class
| machine.
| prepend wrote:
| It's sort of the same reason people drive big trucks into
| work every day.
|
| 5% of the time I need to travel with my laptop. I'd rather
| not maintain two machines.
|
| My daily dev is an 8cpu MacBook Pro. It's not as fast as a
| proper workstation but I can take it anywhere with about 5
| seconds prep time.
| senko wrote:
| I'd love to do that, but my laptop's and workstation's state
| inevitably get out of sync leading up to "wait why doesn't
| this work ... spend a couple of minutes .. ah yes I did X on
| the other device".
|
| (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more
| powerful workstation _and_ laptop :-)
|
| And VNCing into my workstation from the laptop has all the
| drawbacks that Matthew described in the article.
| itintheory wrote:
| > (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a
| more powerful workstation and laptop :-)
|
| Why do you believe that to be the case? Docker performance
| overhead is so minimal I highly doubt you'd be able to tell
| any difference compared to native processes.
| senko wrote:
| I currently work on a project that involves 28 docker
| containers (edit: on Linux, so no extra VM overhead like
| on a Mac), and I definitely can tell the difference
| compared to native processes.
| thfuran wrote:
| Isn't it a full vm on Macs?
| dugmartin wrote:
| If you do your work in VSCode you can setup the following
| pretty easily and it works really well (I use it to connect
| to my workstation in my home office when I work in a coffee
| shop on my laptop or the rare occasions I go into the
| office):
|
| 1. Install Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/) on your
| laptop and workstation and enable the "MagicDNS"
| (https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/) feature. This
| sets up a VPN mesh between your machines (and any other you
| add).
|
| 2. Setup you SSH keys so you can login via the "MagicDNS"
| domain name from your laptop to your workstation.
|
| 3. Install the VSCode Remote Development extension
| (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview)
| on your laptop and then open a workspace on your
| workstation via its SSH feature using the "MagicDNS"
| domain.
|
| It is surprisingly fast - you are just sending
| keystrokes/commands over the VPN and not rasterizing the
| host screen like you would with VNC.
| IanCal wrote:
| I have recently started doing this and it's excellent. I
| can just wander away from my desktop, take my laptop and
| go work somewhere else in the house, and I used something
| very similar going away abroad.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| I'm a little confused as to what benefic the
| "MagicDNS"/Tailscale aspect is adding?
|
| Is this faster than a traditional VPN? Is the VSCode
| remote development extension not able to function with a
| traditional VPN?
| itintheory wrote:
| Not OP, but I think the purpose of tailscale w/ magicdns
| is to create a VPN connection directly between the laptop
| and desktop, regardless of the underlying network
| locations of either. I believe tailscale uses connection
| brokering so all connections can be outbound (no firewall
| policy / port forwarding). MagicDNS is probably just a
| quality of life improvement here.
| dugmartin wrote:
| It just makes sshing between the machines by name very
| easy. You can do the same thing by assigning permanent
| IPs to all machines in the mesh and then updating all
| your host files across all the machines in the mesh. Life
| is too short for that.
| Yeroc wrote:
| Bizarre. Most VPNs used in a workplace would take care of
| name-based host resolution (ie DNS) for you. This is not
| a new thing unique to Tailscale.
| corobo wrote:
| Tailscale saves time in this. It does things like busting
| through NATs for you to get the VPN established, useful
| when on varying networks with the laptop, but yeah it is
| a wireguard VPN after that.
|
| (Not op, just butting in)
| senko wrote:
| Yeah, already Tailscale / WireGuard user and SSHing all
| around.
|
| Didn't know VSCode had a headless mode that can be driven
| over the net (which is what your description sounds
| like), will definitely check it out, thanks.
| isignal wrote:
| If your work already uses tailscale, you can use enclave
| to achieve the same thing. Enclave and tailscale seem to
| coexist fine.
| prmoustache wrote:
| My main professionnal OS in a Linux booting up from an nvme
| drive with an usb3 case adapter. The pro laptop I have been
| given only has a screen resolution of 1366x768 and 16GB of
| ram. I don't mind too much when using it as a desktop
| because I have 2 fullhd 24" screens but if I plan to be
| more mobile and work on one screen, or if I need lots of
| memory to boot containers and VMS I boot it on my personnal
| Lenovo. I also boot it sometimes on a desktop in my office
| while I boot the original windows installation of the pro
| laptop updating itself and not be forgotten.
|
| I use adhesive velcros so that the drive is secured on the
| backside of the screen and don't hang from the laptop.
| asdff wrote:
| You could use ssh to connect to the workstation and do all
| your work there, preserving state.
| methyl wrote:
| > Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just
| can't hold a candle to a workstation class machine
|
| Not really true. My M1 Pro is performance-wise very close to
| my previous desktop based Ryzen 5900X, but: 1. It doesn't
| take space on or below my desk 2. Auxiliary screen it
| provides is useful 3. I can unplug it any time and continue
| working from anywhere with the same performance, without
| having to sync up the development environment.
|
| Before M1 Macs I would concur, but right now the major reason
| to pick desktop is Linux availability (which is a subject to
| change with Asahi), not performance.
| vetinari wrote:
| I have M1 (the original) MBP and Ryzen TR2920X desktop
| (with oddles of RAM, multiple NVMe drives and 10 Gbps
| networking). The Mac, while significantly better than any
| Intel laptop I had before, still cannot hold a candle to
| the desktop, sorry.
|
| The desktop is much more power hungry, though.
| TheTon wrote:
| It depends on your workload and codebase. I have a Ryzen
| 5600X in my desktop and for C++ work, my M1 Pro is quite
| a bit faster for clean or incremental builds. The desktop
| is still useful/required for some of my work (using
| x86_64 windows with an nvidia gpu) but I default to the
| Mac for anything that could be done in either place. It
| also helps that I prefer the Mac tools so it's not just
| about the CPU speed.
|
| That said, I'd rather find a new job than trade either
| system for a cloud desktop. I count myself fortunate that
| I've always been in a position to choose my computer and
| tools.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| My System76 laptop with Nvidia graphics is faster than the
| M1 Pro I have for work, has more cores, and 64G of ram
| means I can run all my communications stuff and an ide and
| a compiler and a local k3s and the machine won't break a
| sweat. However, the battery will drain in an hour and a
| half doing all that. Performance is definitely not an issue
| on non-arm machines. Battery life is.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Even in the bad old days when I did work in an office, we
| worked some days in the office and some at home.
|
| Even now that I work remotely, I still go home to see my
| parents for a week at the time and work from there. I
| definitely wouldn't want to be dependent on the internet.
|
| Not to mention in less than a month, my wife and I will be
| doing the digital nomad thing working while flying across the
| country for a few years.
|
| My set up includes a portable USB C powered external monitor
| as a second display and my iPad as a third display. Of course
| I have a Roost laptop stand.
|
| If I need to spin up resources, I use my own (company
| provisioned) dev AWS account and it's just there.
|
| Even the last 60 person startup I worked at would let us set
| up dev AWS accounts with the appropriate guardrails for
| development.
|
| We had CloudFormation templates to spin up environments as
| needed and we could just tear them down.
| paxys wrote:
| "Most of us" absolutely don't do that. My company has 3000+
| people, and I can say with certainty that every single person
| works away from their desk at some point in the day. I would
| quit my job in an instant if I had to be tied to a desktop at
| a particular spot all my life.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I guess this is why I ultimately went for a fully spec'd
| Macbook Pro. It's the price of a car but the value of having
| workstation class performance anywhere I go makes it easily
| worth it.
| terinjokes wrote:
| I've asked for a workstation from corporate IT, because I'm
| nearly always working from the same spot, and would be okay
| with a Chromebook on the rare situations I'm working remote.
|
| The cost of a beefy (but properly cooled) workstation + cheap
| Chromebook isn't much different than a corporate laptop. It's
| just not an option being considered anymore.
| BozeWolf wrote:
| I bring my laptop with me to other teams for questions. I
| also bring my laptop for presentations, demo's and sometimes
| for refinements. I work at home 2 out of 4 days.
|
| And I am no exception. The whole company I work for does
| this. I cannot imagine working with a workstation.
|
| A big part of my team has crappy laptops and work just fine
| with a citrix client. I am a developer and do not understand
| how they deal with it, but the ba's are ok with it!
| make3 wrote:
| wtf do you do with your CODING workstation that a M1 computer
| can't do?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Warming his office.
| lupire wrote:
| Compile large code base.
| moduspol wrote:
| What development are you doing where there's a notable
| difference between an M1 Mac and a "workstation class
| machine?"
|
| Is it just running a bunch of VMs? I don't doubt the tasks
| exist but it's got to be a list that's been dwindling for the
| last few years.
| glandium wrote:
| Not GP, but:
|
| Building Firefox on a macbook air or pro M1: half an hour.
| Fastest M1 max is around 15 minutes.
|
| Building Firefox on my Threadripper workstation: 5 minutes.
| simfoo wrote:
| This is also my experience. Large Rust/C/C++ code bases
| will easily compile 3-4x as quickly with a fast
| workstation as with a top end laptop. I blame thermal
| design and power limits
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Android development, a clean build of our project on an M1
| Pro is 15 minutes, a clean build from our build server
| (which is ultimately just a thick 11700K or something along
| those lines, so still relatively old) is 3 minutes.
|
| Thermal throttling is a bitch.
| patrick451 wrote:
| At my job, our main software is a multi-million line c++
| codebase. It takes most devs 45 minutes to an hour to
| compile without a fresh ccache, and this is a workstation
| with 8 physical cores. On my laptop, a fresh compile takes
| over 2 hours. This can be brought down to under 10 minutes
| with enough cores. Partly due to poor internal dependency
| management, it's pretty common that every git pull or
| rebase requires recompiling ~1/3 of the codebase and
| waiting multiple minutes to compile in an edit/compile/test
| cycle is common.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I think anyone who wants a large amount of RAM or who works
| on projects in compiled languages will easily notice the
| difference.
| Test0129 wrote:
| You nailed it. Portability. Also if you're working
| professionally it's far easier to collect your property as a
| company when you don't have to pay oversized shipping costs
| for a desktop.
|
| Though rarely is a laptop in clamshell mode as good as a
| desktop. For certain things, I don't think they'll ever be.
| For example, graphics work and a lot of scientific work just
| isn't sufficient unless it's done on a desktop.
| romeoblade wrote:
| I have a work laptop, but do 99% of my work on an identical
| VM that sets on my homelab proxmox cluster. Working this way
| allows me to work from any device, even my phone or iPad from
| anywhere. It's encrypted, has all the standard security tools
| required for work, etc. Our VPN suite checks for all of that
| on connection. I have the added benefit of being able to
| provision with massive amount of resources that it'll only
| use when needed due to ballooning and quick backup and
| rollbacks due to LVM thin provisioning.
|
| I do have everything sync back to the work laptop so in the
| rare case I lose internet or have a hardware issue with the
| cluster I can continue working. But that's only happened once
| in the last two years when a completing fiber provider cut a
| fiber line on my property laying their own fiber. (Not their
| fault, my current provider had the markings off by 50', and
| even then the foreman gave me a gift certificates for the
| trouble)
| brundolf wrote:
| It depends what you're doing. For a normal web dev workflow,
| I have yet to see my M1 MBP be anything but flawlessly
| responsive. I'm sure there are other workloads where it's
| different
| alkonaut wrote:
| Becsuse the business only provides you with one machine so if
| you need a portable one one day of 100 then it has to be a
| laptop.
|
| Buying or maintaining two devices per developer is too costly
| regardless of whether the pair (a cheap laptop and decent
| desktop) is cheaper than an expensive laptop.
| temac wrote:
| > Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just
| can't hold a candle to a workstation class machine.
|
| My M1 Pro is faster in some workloads than a small Dell tower
| sold as a "workstation". Of course I could buy a huge
| workstation with a 250W CPU or some kind of insanity like
| that, but then I suspect its power efficiency will be 4 times
| worse than the M1 Pro. The Dell tower already makes quite a
| good amount of noise under load while being beaten by a
| mostly silent M1 Pro.
| indymike wrote:
| > I don't understand why folks default to laptops for
| development.
|
| I think there's a lot of cost/benefit that comes down to:
| depends on what you are building. I had lunch with a VR dev
| last week. He needed a big machine for huge MS builds. I do a
| lot of web and network programming, and a $1200 LG Gram
| (i7/32GB, 17" screen) is way more than adequate. The
| important thing is that employers understand that slow
| computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble
| developers with them.
| vsareto wrote:
| >The important thing is that employers understand that slow
| computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble
| developers with them.
|
| Sadly, that's not going to fly these days with those same
| employers thinking people slack off more often remotely vs.
| in the office.
| gjm11 wrote:
| If people are slacking off more when working remotely,
| then measures that make _doing the job_ less frustrating
| seem likely to have outsized positive effects, by
| reducing that slacking-off.
|
| (Maybe I'm assuming I'm more typical than I really am. I
| know that when the work I'm supposed to be doing is
| frustrating and annoying I feel much more temptation to
| do other things instead.)
| vsareto wrote:
| I'm saying they're not going to see the logic of saving
| time with better equipment when they're complaining about
| people slacking off remotely.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| True, employment costs out-compete costs for hardware very
| quickly. If your employee takes 10 minutes per day waiting
| on tasks because the system is too slow, you can instead
| buy a pretty decent rig every year.
| afavour wrote:
| > Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds
| at the same desk everyday.
|
| Got to take exception to that. I'm a developer developer an
| I'm still required to get up from my desk to attend meetings
| etc, and I need my laptop in them. Or pair programming. It is
| usually a different kind of work so there's probably a world
| where I could have a desktop and a laptop but inevitably I'd
| end up needing to do something the iPad can't do and get
| frustrated.
| duxup wrote:
| Are most development environments high performance / high
| computer utilization environments?
|
| I was under the impression they were not.
|
| I couldn't tell you if I was on a laptop or desktop when I'm
| docked ...
| rr888 wrote:
| I've had this in the last few jobs. One reason for it is that to
| move desks in NYC requires a union employee to move the computer
| which ends up costing a few thousand dollars. With terminals and
| a cloud PC you avoid this.
| rcarmo wrote:
| As a European, I find this befuddling. A union employee of
| whom?
| rr888 wrote:
| Doesn't matter who's paying them as long as they're union.
| There are certain things you just can't yourself.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Back when I worked for $MEGACORP, we wanted to mount some
| monitors to the wall in the infosec space for Big Cool
| Dashboards. The quoted price from the union contractors
| that had a lock on all HQ building modifications was
| frightfully high (five figures to just mount some TVs).
| They spec'd asbestos inspectors for a space that had been
| certified asbestos-free, had safety observers that had to
| stand around and be sure the 'job site' was safe, etc.
|
| We went and just bought rolling stands instead. We thought
| about sneaking the Best Buy techs in but decided we liked
| our jobs too much to do that. When they found out we just
| bought stands instead of having the screens mounted they
| tried to throw a hissy fit but were unsuccessful (we didn't
| actually break any rules).
|
| This same job required me to get an exemption from two
| unions because the devices I worked with communicated with
| RF energy (radio union) and I needed a screwdriver to get
| inside of them (IBEW). Sigh. It didn't matter than the wire
| techs down the hall from me didn't know JTAG from JPEG -- I
| couldn't risk getting a grievance because someone thought
| I, a mere unrepresented member of "management" (as everyone
| who wasn't union-represented was called), was takin' their
| jerbs.
| cardanome wrote:
| I don't get the use case. Why would you even consider using a
| cloud desktop?
|
| Even a very low-spec laptop is going to run a simple graphical
| desktop environment like Xfce just fine. Watching a youtube
| video, browsing the web and even video conferencing can be
| handled with any new-ish laptop.
|
| And in reality, you still want a reliable laptop with decent
| keyboard, long battery life, good display and so on. So you won't
| end up on a low spec machine to begin with.
|
| For computation heavy dev stuff a simple SSH access is good
| enough. It can be a very smooth experience with a locally running
| VS Code or something.
| NibLer wrote:
| I would love a great cloud desktop. No worries about local
| backup, ability to use older hardware.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Contractors, no way to take code out premises (assuming proper
| security settings on the VMs), and easy to get new instances
| instead of waiting for crap Dell and HP dual core laptops, with
| 8GB and 256GB HDD.
| nefix wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm part of the IsardVDI project
| (https://gitlab.com/isard/isardvdi)
|
| In my opinion, developing is not a really good use case. Some
| of our team develops using VSCode + SSH against a remote VM.
|
| One of the best use cases we've found is education and,
| specifically, trade schools. There are some trade school
| courses that require really specific software (image and sound,
| designing electronics, interacting with proprietary robots,
| etc.), and it's a painful experience to manage all of that, add
| new programs, etc. (some trade schools have 60+ courses, each
| one having different subjects and different software through
| the year!) By having cloud desktops, the teacher can create a
| template with their requirements and share that template with
| the students, and if the requirements change, it's as simple as
| modifying the template and sharing it again.
|
| Also, most of the public schools here are underfunded, so they
| end up with really old machines, and the cost of renewing a
| whole classroom gets really high: let's say a new machine costs
| between 600EUR and 1000EUR (depending on the trade course
| requirements). If you have 30 machines for each classroom, it's
| something around 24k. (Then there are lots of classrooms, you
| get the idea)
|
| By having "cloud" desktops, there's no need for renewing old
| hardware, since you can have something like xfce + the viewer,
| and all the systems can easily manage that load (we even have
| classrooms with RPIs), and this can be a huge money saving
|
| In the end, cloud desktops aren't the best option for all the
| use cases, as the author puts it:
|
| > Overall, the most important thing to take into account here
| is that your users almost certainly have more use cases than
| you expect, and this sort of change is going to have direct
| impact on the workflow of every single one of your users. Make
| sure you know how much that's going to be, and take that into
| consideration when suggesting it'll save you money.
| thesh4d0w wrote:
| When your game developer has and needs a $4k workstation, and
| they work from home half the week. No reason to buy them
| another machine and have them maintain two seperate workspaces,
| we just give them parsec.
|
| All our staff seem happy and we don't get complaints. Author
| hasn't tried modern tools it seems.
|
| Another use case: mobile people with laptops, who sometimes
| want to hop in to a play test or show a game off to a vendor.
| No need for them to have a gaming laptop 99% of the time, when
| an X1 carbon + parsec to a beefy box work fine.
| Jorge1o1 wrote:
| This isn't the intended use case, but one upside of cloud
| desktops is that if I ever forget to bring my work laptop with
| me, I can RDP from a friend's computer, etc.
|
| In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops you
| can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of someone
| else's money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y billion
| dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install VSCode or
| MobaXTerm on your own.
|
| IT presumably got tired of being bombarded with application
| install requests, so one solution is to use vendorized cloud
| desktops that come with pretty easy tools (for them) to install
| applications.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| > In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops
| you can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of
| someone else's money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y
| billion dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install
| VSCode or MobaXTerm on your own.
|
| I feel this so much.
| guhidalg wrote:
| I don't understand when and why so much power was delegated
| to IT w.r.t installing software. The FSF needs to start
| fighting IT and device management policies before talking
| about open source software.
| origin_path wrote:
| It's because people install malware a lot. Usually it comes
| along for the ride with pirated software, creating a 2x
| headache. I remember when they introduced similar policies
| at Google for Windows workstations - the stated rationale
| was that Windows users would warez literally anything and
| this was independent of job role or position. Senior
| engineering managers would be warezing things and it would
| come bound to malware. So they moved to binary
| whitelisting, eventually :(
|
| Linux avoids this problem mostly because it doesn't have
| much commercial software to pirate in the first place.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I'd like a sync'd work env that does local as well as remote-
| from-anywhere ability.
|
| The fact that Microsoft failed at a dozen sync frameworks (as
| chat is for google, sync was for Microsoft) and in 2020 this is
| still not really doable.
|
| Also, I still can't find a good guide for spinning up a desktop
| in AWS.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Companies with strict data protection policies can force the
| usage of VDE for sensitive tasks, as part of a broader DLP
| program.
| Frost1x wrote:
| My work environment has a set of tasks that need to run
| exclusively in a tightly controlled cloud desktop
| environment. It's a nightmare.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Corollary: your company might force to use you a cloud VM
| desktop _even when your laptop is significantly more
| performant than the entire server holding these VMs_.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop?_
|
| I've travelled to and through countries ( _e.g._ in the Gulf,
| France, India) with my work laptop where I was deeply
| uncomfortable having those data on hand. Taking a clean machine
| and remoting into that one when needed removes a lot of
| paranoia points.
| cardanome wrote:
| Why not just encrypt your hard disk?
|
| Please don't say something like you don't trust encryption.
| We have known cases where even state actors could not crack
| encrypted devices. Not to mention the remote communication
| you have would be easier to monitor and possibly decrypt
| anyway.
|
| Sure, in theory you would need a kill switch in case some
| special forces come through your window while you are working
| on you laptop and force you to remove your hands from it but
| but I doubt you live such an interesting life for that to be
| a realistic treat model.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Many jurisdictions around the world have laws that allow
| police to compel you to decrypt data, particularly at
| border crossings.
| petercooper wrote:
| _Why not just encrypt your hard disk?_
|
| While this is a good idea, note that in some countries it
| is an offence to not hand over keys or passwords when
| requested (or can rapidly become one - like in the UK) so
| not carrying data with you in the first place can defend
| against that.
| cardanome wrote:
| What is stopping them to force you to give access to your
| cloud providers though?
|
| I think there are solutions to make hidden partitions.
| You would have have to create a clean, plausible system
| to show potential attackers.
|
| Still feel that clouds providers are a bigger attack
| surface than encrypted local data. To get you cloud data
| an attacker would just need to be able to compel you to
| give the password. With local data, they also need to get
| physical access to it. You could for example decide to
| not take your laptop to a potential dangerous meeting and
| store it somewhere safe.
|
| Plus, cloud provider have way more attack surface area.
| They get regularly hacked. Some state actors already have
| back doors or can otherwise compel the provider to hand
| out your data.
|
| The more I think about the more I think storing sensitive
| data in the cloud is not a good idea for privacy and
| security.
| petercooper wrote:
| _What is stopping them to force you to give access to
| your cloud providers though?_
|
| Here's my thinking: If you're travelling to a country
| with nosy officials and you needed access to a lot of
| sensitive data, if it were on your regular (but
| encrypted) hard drive then it would be more visible if
| they asked to see the machine. With that data online, it
| could be in a system you only access by a URL you
| _remember_ which they can 't see. You can show them a
| normal desktop.
|
| _Still feel that clouds providers are a bigger attack
| surface than encrypted local data._
|
| If you are actively being targeted, I agree. I was
| thinking more the "curious official" folks seem to run
| into when travelling. Since the mere possession of
| certain plain text documents is a criminal offence in my
| country, this has the potential to catch people unawares.
|
| _I think there are solutions to make hidden partitions.
| You would have have to create a clean, plausible system
| to show potential attackers._
|
| This is a good tradeoff and would probably be fine unless
| they're _really_ out for you - a whole other ballgame.
| jhickok wrote:
| I don't think you need a remote _desktop_ in order to keep
| the data off the machine.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, I'd much rather deal with a local desktop and a
| remote filesystem, for sure.
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| I'd like that too, but can you give me a working example
| that is not based around using a VPN, or editing
| documents on the browser?
|
| (which are both viable, but there is a different number
| of drawbacks to each)
| [deleted]
| dirtyid wrote:
| PIA to manage multiple systems / os that don't have functional
| parity. My steamlink, tablet and occasionally phone remote
| desktops strait onto my desktop with all the customizations I'm
| used to for daily tasks. It's just nice not having to adjust.
| Only problem (relatively new) is DRM preventing many streaming
| service from displaying video.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If your definition of zero trust includes the endpoint devices
| because they are in an area that the general public can access.
|
| If you want access to your desktop from multiple locations. Ex,
| at my local hospital the staff can tap their badge to any
| computer and instantly reconnect to their desktop exactly where
| they left off.
|
| If you are in a multi-site scenario but your big LOB app hates
| the internet so you need all your clients to be in the same
| building as the server. This is actually the reason I deploy
| vmware horizon... im not sure what jack henry and Fiserv are
| doing to make their overblown CRUD apps so network heavy and
| inefficient to operate, but I'm happy they are finally rolling
| out their own cloud-first apps so they can deal with their own
| garbage instead of outsourcing their support to their
| customeres IT guys.
|
| If you literally just can't acquire hardware because of a
| pandemic and need more compute than you have on hand.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You definition of zero trust can never include the endpoint
| devices. Those get to see everything you type on them, and
| have the same level of access to your services that its user
| has.
|
| Instead, with a remote desktop you are only adding a bit more
| of vulnerabilities. It can never remove any.
|
| (About those others, there exist some nice works about
| program portability, that culminated on fully distributed
| OSes, but those have no adoption. Instead, people prefer to
| hack distribution over the piles of hacks that are modern
| OSes. Obviously, it doesn't work well.)
| free652 wrote:
| I work at the company the gives a chromebook and a cloud desktop.
| Works great for me.
|
| VS Code for the development, SSH for the remote desktop, most of
| operations can be done via VSCode anyways. Chrome RDP is slow, I
| agree. I never use it anyways.
| jopsen wrote:
| I have a fast laptop and solid desktop...
|
| But I frequently use vscode+ssh+tmux on the desktop when
| working from home.
|
| Then the powerful laptop just has to run chrome.. which to be
| fair, it barely does without crashing :)
| woeh wrote:
| I've had good results with offloading work to a cloud based
| server where I ran my docker containers during development. Just
| CLI though, I left the graphical part on the client side. As
| mentioned by others, VSCode with remote SSH was a blessing for
| such a scenario.
|
| There are benefits; I could scale up my workstation even for an
| hour or so, with more memory or a fancier cpu. And it was easier
| to share my work with other (remote) colleagues; because they
| were at another timezone I could leave the server up for them
| when needed, while I shut my laptop down for the day and see
| their feedback the next day.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I'm glad he brought up accessibility. My company has been working
| on a remote desktop product [1] that addresses this issue,
| particularly for blind users. The connection carries audio output
| from the remote machine, and the keyboard input handling code on
| both sides is designed to work with the quirks of screen readers,
| so running a screen reader on the remote machine works well.
| Beyond that, if the remote machine isn't running a screen reader,
| there's a way to get speech output on the controlling machine
| using the open-source NVDA screen reader for Windows, without
| requiring audio output on the remote machine. We still need to
| work on Braille output and screen magnification, and we've only
| started thinking about alternate input methods, so this doesn't
| cover everything, but the problems are solvable.
|
| [1]: https://getrim.app/ I don't normally self-promote commercial
| products like this, but this is relevant to the article, and I
| thought people might find it interesting.
| hackrbrazil wrote:
| Remote code development tools like Gitpod and Codespaces may be a
| good answer to the issues from the post. They sit in the middle
| between purely using SSH and full remote desktop experience, so
| feel like using your local machine while giving you access to
| computing power from the cloud.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Not sure if this is the Cloud not Thin clients but in a school
| licensing killed any Thin Client attempts.
|
| It was just too hard.
|
| I never got to the stage they hint at, if a tiny amount of things
| won't work, does it means the whole idea fails?
|
| If you only have Word/Excel/internet etc in one lab inevitably
| someone will ask for X,Y,Z. Is the money saved on computer and
| maintenance and benefits of instant installs/upgrades worth more
| or less than the property & teacher/student time costs of that
| lab running at 90% useability.
|
| But licensing stopped the experiment.
| overspeed wrote:
| > Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to
| perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code
| being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a
| workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud.
|
| JetBrains has Gateway[1] and VSCode has remote Dev tools[2]
|
| Gateway's performance is very dependent on the network
| connectivity. If you have bad ping, you're going to curse the
| world seeing the input delay.
|
| VSCode seems to be caching the files locally and updating them
| separately. With bad internet, you still get the native input
| lag.
|
| [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway
|
| [2] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
| zerop wrote:
| I am studying if cloud IDEs are better option than giving laptops
| to team (From cost and managing PoV). Any experiences around
| cloud IDEs for teams.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I believe this is how Google does development.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to
| perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code
| being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a
| workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud.
|
| I'd mention SSH port forwarding in this section. For webdev
| you'll want to run your server on the remote host and use the
| local web browser. SSH port forwarding works great for this. I
| recently used this setup to get some extra RAM for a short
| project that could only be run as a collection of memory hungry
| microservices. This way I could get the whole thing running on
| one box; I spun down the server once the project was done.
| qw wrote:
| Jetbrains has support for remote development environments. I
| haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising.
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/
| MarkSweep wrote:
| I can confirm that using JetBrains Gateway to run IntelliJ is
| more pleasant than using Chrome Remote Desktop, X11
| forwarding, JetBrains projector, or Xpra.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Except it's still buggy like hell.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| I should have said, being better than those alternatives
| is a very low bar.
| nsm wrote:
| Is there a way in JB Gateway to re-use an existing project?
|
| I am in the office 50% of the time, working on my desktop
| with CLion. The other 50% I'm remote. The one time I tried
| Gateway, it asked me to create a new project, which meant
| building another index of a giant codebase, and not having
| any of my per-project settings. The time and disk space of
| another index turned me off right away. I couldn't find a
| way to just re-use the existing project. So for now I just
| suffer through using NoMachine to remote in, and then
| operate CLion.
| pwarner wrote:
| I get a sense this model is the future, but also don't know if
| anyone using it at scale? Any examples out there?
| easton wrote:
| GitHub uses it internally (using their Codespaces product,
| which also just lets you SSH directly into the VM it
| creates): https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-
| team-move...
| Havoc wrote:
| vscode remote ssh is a decent compromise - the interface is
| "local" the stuff is remote. Hardly noticable that it isn't true
| local. The second the entire thing is piped through a VNC/RDP
| type setup it becomes shyte to use.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| rc_mob wrote:
| My company did this to us. I'm thinking of quitting.
| politelemon wrote:
| What do you mean by 'this' - there are several examples given
| in the article. Can you share some of the problems you're
| facing too?
| arnaudsm wrote:
| We underestimate how latency matters for user experience.
|
| Like the famous "100ms = 1% of sales" at Amazon
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900
| pmontra wrote:
| I thought about buying a desktop again after almost 30 years,
| bury it in some room at my home and use my laptop as remote
| desktop. I work in different rooms as seasons go by (so no air
| conditioning), sometimes even morning vs afternoon. Not a common
| use case I guess but that's exactly the point of the article.
|
| I think I'll keep using my laptop as primary and only machine
| because many of the scenarios in the article also apply to me and
| what if I have to visit a customer? It never happened again since
| the pandemic but it could.
| spookierookie wrote:
| IMHO remote desktops (cloud or DaaS) is a terrible idea with even
| more terrible executions. I never tried one that could measure up
| to a local environment.
| mickeyk wrote:
| As a software dev, I like using whatever as a local env but
| SSH'ing into something more powerful to perform any heavy
| lifting. There's also tools like VSCode Remote that make it
| almost like developing locally. That said, the most taxing tools
| that I use regularly are things like video conferencing and
| "collaboration" tools like Miro. These things are hell.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > the most taxing tools that I use regularly are things like
| video conferencing and "collaboration" tools like Miro
|
| Do you mean computationally taxing or mentally taxing?
| p_l wrote:
| In my experience, both?
|
| And combine computationally heavy result of running stuff
| like Miro adding to any inherent complexity of collaboration
| task... Ehhh
| maeln wrote:
| That is not what the article is talking about:
|
| > I'm also going to restrict this discussion to the case of "We
| run a full graphical environment on the VM, and stream that to
| the laptop" - an approach that only offers SSH access is much
| more manageable, but also significantly more restricted in
| certain ways. With those details mentioned, let's begin.
| [deleted]
| bhauer wrote:
| Using a third-party cloud only ensures that all work scenarios
| enjoy the same lowest-common denominator.
|
| My preference is to select one of the work contexts (e.g., the
| office) as primary and to put a workstation there, then remote to
| that workstation from secondary contexts (e.g., at home). This
| configuration gives me first-class computing where I need it
| most, in the primary context, and a decent second-class option
| when I need to work in other contexts.
|
| I happily worked with this configuration for more than a decade
| and found it served all of my local and remote needs.
| anxiously wrote:
| I don't use a graphical cloud setup, but I do use a vps for all
| of my development.
|
| It is nice having a single cloud based machine that is accessible
| via ssh on any of my physical devices.
|
| I have a dev environment closer to production, ssl and publicly
| accessible urls for testing services and sharing to compare
| designs and UI changes, etc.
|
| Fantastic setup for anyone that likes a vim+tmux workflow. Only a
| single environment to keep up to date and configured. Daily
| snapshots and backups.
|
| Keeps the cost of other hardware down as well.. I can work
| effectively on cheap hardware which certainly offsets the server
| costs. I did a cost rundown before and it was like ~15 years of
| my vps and cheap hardware equal to a single entry level MacBook
| Pro.
| d--b wrote:
| Been working remotely for 6 years. My vm is in New York and I
| live in rural France. I connect over a 4g connection. I have a
| 24" monitor.
|
| The stuff is seamless. I mean it. I hate lagging, I hate stuff
| that doesn't work. But this does work. Really well.
| 300bps wrote:
| Similar setup for me and I've been working in a virtual desktop
| environment at two companies for the past ten years. Would not
| trade the flexibility it gives for anything and it Just Works
| for me.
|
| Most of the cons listed in the article either don't apply (VR)
| or just work fine for me (video).
| leoh wrote:
| Who do you purchase your VM from? What are the specs/cost?
| teeray wrote:
| All these dev-machines-in-a-cloud sound wonderful from a
| security, compliance, and onboarding perspective. What is often
| forgotten is that this is now a service you're operating and a
| massive SPOF. If it goes down (and it will), productivity drops
| to exactly zero. It's like sending your devs home until it's
| fixed.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Not that much different than a power failure at the office, or
| your uplink going down. Both more frequent, in my experience,
| than cloud zonal outages.
| origin_path wrote:
| Laptops have batteries that can ride out a power failure of
| typical duration, especially for non-dev workers. People can
| get a lot done without the internet.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| nobody thinks that. not in their sane mind. except for the "you
| vill ovn nothing, und we vill be happy" technocrats, but their
| reasons for that are their own.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > aren't as good as you'd think
|
| I always find titles like this clickbaity, because the author has
| no idea what anyone in the audience would think.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I don't see Xpra mentioned in comments yet.
|
| Works pretty well for us since remote windows and local are
| seamlessly integrated and managed by local WM. Solves the multi
| monitor issues. Definitely lower latency than vnc or rdp or
| nomachine from our testing. Windows, Mac and Linux clients all
| work well.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have xpra installed but seldom use it since it has no real
| benefits (for me) over RDP (which does multimonitor, audio,
| etc.), but I also need to access Windows desktops.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I know this sounds gross, but I wonder if Chromebooks could
| benefit from being able to trigger local browser actions in the
| remote browser. So you can click "open in new tab" in your remote
| and it opens in your local browser. Bonus points if the remote
| session is also in a tab, so it just switches you away and you
| can come back easily.
| easton wrote:
| Well thought out Citrix and RDP setups have something like
| this, where certain apps are able to break through and use the
| local GPU (usually video conferencing apps, like Teams and
| WebEx).
| kanzure wrote:
| Is there a cloud desktop product where I can select a development
| environment and instantly RDP into it pre-configured and ready to
| compile code with libraries installed etc?
| sbf501 wrote:
| Who uses a physical workstation anymore? (Besides artists.)
|
| OP is suggesting a complete remote desktop for Office
| applications, like Video Conferencing. Ironically, for all the
| crap X takes, it could actually pull this off. Moreso for
| Wayland. I'm surprised there isn't a graphics client/server model
| out there as good as X after ~40 years. But I think the problem
| is too much layering: trying to put a VM in the cloud as an
| office desktop requires way too much bandwidth & latency through
| a remote desktop without a client/server graphics mode. The tools
| are there, they just aren't being used because they are missing a
| security layer.
|
| I haven't used a physical workstation at my desk since 1999, and
| I was a designer/architect at Intel for decades. Everything was
| done via VNC. Back then it was called "distributed computing"
| with AFS, so it was a "proto-cloud". And before that I used a sun
| workstation to telnet into beefier computers. This was
| AIX/SunOS/LInux based.
|
| Granted, I was not videoconferencing, but there's no reason why
| the desktop needs to be rendered in the VM (including the video
| stream!!!), then encoded, then decoded, then rendered again. It's
| just dumb.
| leoh wrote:
| X for wire protocol is truly awful compared to chrome Remote
| Desktop. I've been eager to use it and have played with all
| manner of settings, but it's very slow pretty much no matter
| what. Apparently it sends many more frame updates -- ie is very
| network and compute heavy compared to other modern protocols
| that send rolling images.
| politelemon wrote:
| A _lot_ of people use workstations. As described in the
| article, they are more powerful and many people need that
| power. You may have a specific, limited set of anecdotal data
| that you 're using to ask that question rhetorically probably?
| sbf501 wrote:
| Yep. All I have is have anecdotal data.
|
| I believe desktops are on their way out. The trend has been
| happening for ~30 years. Even Android is working on virtual
| phone OS.
|
| The only applications I've encountered that _need_ a
| workstation are: Audio Engineering, Video Editing, and 3D
| mock-up (prior to sending to render farms). All arts.
|
| What are some other examples? Everything I know about science
| and engineering (academic and commercial) uses a
| cloud/farm/distributed.
| theptip wrote:
| I have never got this set up, but I think a hybrid approach could
| be quite good; something like pytest-xdist remote SSH builders
| perhaps. (Maybe you can rsync the diffs in the background though,
| instead of when you hit the "test" button, to speed things up?)
|
| https://pypi.org/project/pytest-xdist/#sending-tests-to-remo...
|
| Running a local-first setup is nice for things like iteratively
| step-debugging your latest changes on a single test case, but
| being able to push the diffs to a fast remote build server
| (elastic cluster?) to speed up the "run all the tests" action
| would be nice.
|
| I think you can do this with Clang remote builders too. I hear
| Bazel has this.
|
| Is this something that anyone has experience with? It seems like
| it could be the best of both worlds, from a compute performance
| standpoint.
|
| (As others have noted, the other big benefit of a cloud desktop
| is that you don't have to spend time setting up your dev
| environment, which is constant toil for new developers; Github
| mentioned this as a big contributor of friction in
| https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move....)
| the8472 wrote:
| Another one is an unholy confluence of corporate compliance
| bullshit
|
| Connecting to the remote machine needs to go through corporate
| SSO (in a browser) that then starts the native remote client.
| Policy requires MFA, strong, frequently changed passwords and
| Windows Hello on the laptop. Policy also requires screen lock
| after 5 minutes. For some reason policy also requires disabling
| copy-paste to remote machines.
|
| The end result is that the remote session gets locked out every 5
| minutes when you do something in the laptop's browser instead. To
| log back in one either has to enter a long, complicated password
| (can't paste it from the password manager!) or use an mfa code.
| Hardware tokens don't work either due to unreliable USB
| forwarding.
|
| Having to jump through those hoops once or twice a day would be
| tolerable, dozens of times is grating.
|
| I assume the policies are written for all the worst-case
| scenarios where people remote in from private, shared devices or
| use a laptop in a public place. But they add a lot of unnecessary
| friction when a laptop is used from a lockable home office.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| A small Windows utility called caffeine generates fake
| keypresses (F15 which is not on most keyboards) and/or moves
| the mouse slightly, which prevents screen lock from kicking in.
| r00fus wrote:
| Why would they disable paste-into? I can understand not
| allowing data egress but ingress? I don't understand the use
| case they're preventing against.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I had a similar problem that required me having to auth 36
| times a day.
|
| I told them to fix it or I was opening a health claim for back
| issues from having to 2factor.
|
| Took them a few weeks but now I auth once or twice a day.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Does your password manager have an auto-type feature?
| the8472 wrote:
| The remote desktop app captures the shortcut that would
| normally trigger auto-type. If I invoke it from the password
| manager's GUI it does work.
| wwarner wrote:
| tilt.dev looks very promising and addresses some of these issues
| lupire wrote:
| Not bad article, but intro deeply confuses the issue. If you want
| fast builds for your org, use a build server _farm_ that is much
| faster than the fastest workstation, and sma incremental builds
| locally or on your cloud desktop. A local UX machine (15 " Mac
| not built in the Dark Ages of 2016-2020, + desk monitor, good for
| 5+ years) with a FUSE mounted remote storage and a build farm is
| a great combo.
| anxiously wrote:
| I used to think so, but I have yet to own a Mac that survived
| more than 3 years. However, that may have been partially due to
| the "Dark Ages", but more like 2014-2021.
|
| I'm happier with something Linux friendly (thinkpad x220,
| pinebook pro, etc) and a remote system I use over ssh (sshfs,
| ssh+vim+tmux, etc). All at the great cost of ~$220 + $5/month?
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| What are options for the fuse mounted remote storage?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Have generally been skeptical of 'cloud desktop' but... I had a
| friend who got in to sales for a cloud desktop provider about 6-7
| years ago. There was only one real strong use case and she sold
| to that niche. Some specific cad/modeling/rendering vertical had
| software they used, and it was a CPU bear. Running that
| 'remotely' in the cloud was _much_ faster than anything they
| could have locally. Managing all the licensing and security
| /perms there was an added benefit, but she was also mostly
| selling to smaller firms that didn't have full time staff to
| handle that.
|
| For the market she was in, at the time, there was a moderately
| clear win. I watched a pitch, and the speed diff was real. The
| productivity gains in many folks saving an hour or two in
| rendering time was easily worth the... I can't remember -
| $200/month/seat maybe? Outside of those types of use cases, the
| benefits were harder to justify. And... in 2020+... unsure if
| local desktop CPU caught up enough that the benefits were lower.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| This sounds like a good use case!
|
| I'm considering cloud desktop at work right now for something
| similarish. We have a _fat_ pile of data and want to let people
| use the data. If we give them VMs on the same network as the
| data (with super high bandwidth and CPU amd GPU), they can
| manipulate the data quickly.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I worked in architectural CAD for a number of years (as a
| software engineer, not an architect), and this surprises me.
| Sure you needed a PC with a little bit of beef to work in it
| smoothly, but not unaffordably beefy. A not all that recent
| macbook was good enough for pretty much all of our customers. I
| left the company in 2019, and plenty of people were still
| working on a 2012 macbook on the latest version. My own dev
| machine was a 2015 macbook.
|
| We did offer cloud rendering as a subscription service, but
| most people just did big renders overnight, and that was
| usually animations, not single-frame renders.
|
| I'm curious which CAD software is such a bear that cloud
| desktop was worth it. Whether the particular industry was just
| that incredibly complex, or if the product was just slow and
| inefficient.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| The details are hazy, and our paths don't cross any more, so
| I can't say for sure. Yes, overnights were still done in some
| cases, but they were able to do more 'in day' smaller renders
| (IIRC) that was making it worthwhile.
|
| IIRC... she done some consulting work for a particular firm,
| and they were investigating cloud stuff. When they chose that
| vendor, she saw how much of an impact that was making, and
| contacted the cloud vendor and became a
| salesperson/evangelist.
|
| You were on a MacBook. They were all in the Windows/MS world,
| so perhaps there was something about that software that just
| was 'better on windows in the cloud'. Again, sorry I can't
| remember too many more details. I do suspect times have
| changed some, so the ROI may not be there any longer (and
| maybe wasn't there at the time for many folks).
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| The mystery deepens. I mentioned my mac because it's an
| easier comparison to make, but we were cross platform and I
| also had a contemporary ThinkPad. In fact, I worked mostly
| on the ThinkPad because I preferred Visual Studio to XCode.
|
| Most of our customers did stick to mac, though. A lot of
| architects fancy themselves designers and really buy into
| Apple's marketing towards creatives.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| I would've thought architectural CAD like Revit would be
| computationally heavy. What rendering engine(s) do you
| use?
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Citrix HDX 3D-Pro on a GPU enabled VM works pretty well in my
| experience. Even driving multiple screens on the end user system.
| artisanspam wrote:
| This is the terrible norm in the semiconductor industry. VNCs
| everywhere. Almost all EDA GUIs are only designed for Red Hat or
| CentOS so IT makes everyone connect to a datacenter and start an
| X server. Having interviewed at/worked at these companies, I know
| that Intel, NVIDIA, and Apple all do this.
|
| It sucks. Your productivity plummets because each keystroke lags
| and it makes you lose your train of thought. When there's an
| outage, no one can do any work at all.
| Rygian wrote:
| It is good that these "water is wet" statements get written down
| so we can point humidity-skeptical people to them from time to
| time.
|
| The deeper problem is the sad state of affairs of distributed
| computing _for the end user_ :
|
| * Application instances expect to be the only ones modifying the
| files that underlie the document being edited. Most of them
| simply bail out when the files get modified by another
| application.
|
| * The default is "one device = one (local) filesystem" which is
| the exact opposite to what everyone needs: "one person = one
| (distributed) filesystem."
|
| * The case for local-only filesystems only addresses corner
| cases, or deficient distributed file systems that fail to uphold
| basic security constraints (such as "my data is only in my
| devices" or "no SPOF" for my data).
|
| * Whatever gets pushed to the cloud becomes strongly dependent on
| devices and vendors. Users end up handcuffed to a specific
| hardware (iCloud) or software (Android) if they want to have any
| chance of interacting with their own documents from their own
| devices.
|
| * What we need is not cloud desktops, or cloud storage. We need
| local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and vendor
| agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices.
| ElFitz wrote:
| It's incredible how many systems are basically two silos that
| sometimes somehow sync in a totally custom manner, when we have
| so many ways of keeping distributed systems in sync.
|
| Especially true for mobile.
| Shorel wrote:
| > We need local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem,
| and vendor agnostic access to that filesystem from all our
| devices.
|
| I am very happy with pCloud. One of the reasons I got it is: it
| works very well on Linux. It works on Android. It works on
| Windows.
|
| And it works in the browser, for things like video and photos.
|
| Also: no risk of trigger-happy account deletion like with
| Google, if pCloud dies my email still works.
|
| Previously I used OVH online drive service, but it was EOL and
| pCloud is the replacement.
| atentaten wrote:
| How does pCloud differ from Dropbox?
| Shorel wrote:
| I paid for a lifetime subscription.
|
| One payment and so far no complaints at all.
| Rygian wrote:
| > Previously I used OVH online drive service, but it was EOL
| and pCloud is the replacement.
|
| So a vendor has the power to disrupt you whenever they feel
| like EOLing the service you depend on. I understand that's as
| good as it gets today, but it's not good enough.
|
| For me, the only acceptable level of impact is as follows:
|
| * vendor X sunsets their service by date D
|
| * before date D, I sign-up for a new account with vendor Z
| and configure it in my filesystem settings
|
| * I set vendor X as "deprecated,EOL-date=D" in my filesystem
| settings.
|
| Then my filesystem takes care of everything else for me
| _transparently_ , with zero downtime and zero effort. Date D
| comes and goes and I haven't noticed a thing.
| Shorel wrote:
| That's how it happened. OVH announced the EOL about a year
| before the system was shut down.
|
| pCloud is a replacement I choose, nothing to do with old
| OVH service.
| jasode wrote:
| _> What we need is not [...] cloud storage. We need [...] a
| decent distributed filesystem,_
|
| Distributed files to _where_ exactly? You need to be more
| concrete about the remote location of _non-local_ data that
| normal people can use. Ok, so you want "distributed
| filesystem" to not mean "cloud storage" ... So is it p2p?
| Something else?
|
| In other words, we want Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, Android,
| etc operating systems... to have a file system that all points
| to the same "distributed filesystem" and see the same files --
| and for other collaborators to see those files.
|
| But we don't want those os configurations to point to DropBox /
| MS OneDrive / Google Drive / Backblaze, etc. So, we need to be
| concrete on the _alternative common remote location_ that those
| file system APIs would point to. What would the topology of
| that solution look like?
| Rygian wrote:
| To where exactly: my devices. And if I don't want to buy my
| own devices, then to a cloud service that offers opaque
| storage of binary blobs with an API that my filesystem can
| abstract for me.
|
| So the topology is a mesh network of my devices, and perhaps
| optionally a few defined remote endpoints that the opaque
| blob storage service provides me, and that I enter as part of
| the config of my filesystem.
| lupire wrote:
| That sounds like Cloud Storage to me (Dropbox, Google Drive
| Backup/Restore/Sync/whatever it's called this year).
| oriolid wrote:
| This is the problem that needs to be solved. Cloud storage
| and p2p are solutions looking for a problem, but it would be
| nice to let them distract us too much.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > Distributed files to where exactly?
|
| My desktop computer, my laptop computer, my tablet computer,
| my pocket computer. Whether that's cloud or p2p doesn't
| matter to me, the user. I should be able to start working on
| a spreadsheet or presentation on one and, without the
| ceremony of "save to a shared location, close the app, switch
| devices, open the app ... now where's that file again?"
| switch to another and continue editing.
|
| First we need to specify a distributed fs. THEN we can decide
| the "to where" bit.
| franga2000 wrote:
| The "to where" bit is really important when specifying the
| fs. If it includes at least one high-bandwidth high-storage
| high-uptime device (like a server), the requirements and
| capabilities change drastically compared to if it's
| composed of a bunch of battery-powered portable devices on
| limited data plans.
| lupire wrote:
| Ray Ozzie, is that you?!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5661920
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-
| astro...
|
| Come back to us, Microsoft Briefcase!
| resizeitplz wrote:
| Funny you use a spreadsheet as an example. That's been the
| default for Excel for years. Save to
| SharePoint/Teams/OneDrive (whatever MS is calling it these
| days, it's all the same backend) is the default option -
| and multi-user live editing (or one user in multiple
| sessions) just works.
| generalizations wrote:
| That sounds like syncthing. Dunno about phones and tablets,
| but I have that functionality among my computers.
| josteink wrote:
| I use syncthing. It's awesome for computers. Coming from
| Dropbox, then Nextcloud, I find it solves all my needs
| much, much better, at least on well-supported platforms.
|
| I love how I can decide what to sync where, and even
| create my own topology of sync-devices if I like. That
| may sound like crazy complex stuff and over-engineering
| and what not, but it was a solution I landed on
| organically, just through normal use.
|
| That said, it's not entirely smooth on iOS and you
| sometimes needs to manually launch the (third party) app
| to force a sync after changing some files.
| [deleted]
| pluijzer wrote:
| I have no affiliation but want to second this.
|
| If you want to keep your filesystem in sync across many
| devices Syncthing fully enables this.
|
| It is a use case where you would expect a payed service
| would be easier or more reliable but with Syncthing it is
| the exact opposite. Just install it on your devices and
| select the folders you want to keep in sync ... done.
|
| I had never had any problems with it something I cannot
| say about Dropbox which can be terribly slow, hogs my PC
| and resulted in lost files on some occasion.
| Rygian wrote:
| My filesystem consists of [checks du -h . | tail -1] 189
| GB.
|
| I don't think Syncthing (which I love) can cram 189 GB on
| my 64 GB phone.
|
| Yet I expect to have access to my filesystem from my
| phone.
|
| Synthing is a nice "pump-hose system" between reservoirs
| of data. What I was arguing above is to stop having
| separate reservoirs of data to begin with.
| jcelerier wrote:
| I use seafile (similar to syncthing) and it allows to
| browse your data libraries without requiring a local copy
| for these cases
| navane wrote:
| i have it running on an ancient android (4.4) phone,
| perfectly
| solarkraft wrote:
| I just wish Syncthing would allow for deferred sync, i.e.
| you see the file, but it only gets fetched once you
| access it.
|
| That's, imo, the only way to sync large folders. I don't
| need _all_ my Documents /Photos/Movies/Whatever on my
| phone at all times, but I do wish I could access them
| when I need them.
| rcarmo wrote:
| OneDrive does that on Windows and Mac.
| josephg wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. I've been working on CRDTs the last few
| years, and there's a huge opportunity here if we can reinvent
| the concept of the filesystem. Ideally, we'd replace files with
| CRDT-backed objects in the operating system. Then instead of
| fread / fwrite commands (which wastefully overwrite the entire
| file), applications could express semantic changes which get
| saved in a log.
|
| Those changes can be transparently replicated between
| applications, between devices and between users. We'd get
| better performance on-device, and automatic, transparent
| device-to-device replication. And we could trivially enable
| realtime collaborative editing between users. Better still, if
| it happened at the OS level, we could make it work in every
| application on the system.
|
| Right now "linux on the desktop" is slowly and inevitably dying
| in the face of cloud services. How would OpenOffice even
| compete with Google Docs? Do opensource application authors
| need to run their own web servers? (And if so, who pays for
| that?). If we replaced the filesystem with CRDTs, openoffice
| (and every other program on the desktop which edits
| "documents") could have best-in-class collaboration features,
| right there out of the box.
|
| There's an opportunity here to build a really amazing computing
| system.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > * What we need is not cloud desktops, or cloud storage. We
| need local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and
| vendor agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices.
|
| While I agree, this by itself doesn't solve the problem when
| you depend on such a FS for your work in a way that when you
| lose network connectivity, you can no longer work.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| Ideally that would be handled on the FS layer and completely
| transparent to all apps. Things would get synchronized once
| connection is restored.
| Multicomp wrote:
| I mean, isn't that a potential usecase for Syncthing? If I
| go offline on one of my devices, my files are still locally
| on the system. When it comes back online, it re-syncs the
| other devices to use my latest files.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| This is a very simple use case when you are working
| alone. Think about a team of people and hundreds of
| potentially conflicting changes to review manually.*
| Sometimes a tangible divide between online and offline is
| extremely useful.
|
| *) Unless you believe this can be resolved by software -
| I'm afraid we're very far from that point yet.
| viraptor wrote:
| You can't just synchronise things without knowing the file
| formats. You can't do a seamless distributed FS which
| allows offline changes.
|
| Or more precisely, you can, but by choosing the most fresh
| file and people have lost work that way. There's a few
| "dropbox ate my files" stories out there.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That is usually handled by exposing a "driver" API where
| the relevant programs can install merging components.
|
| And yes, default into choosing some one, with an extended
| interface for displaying and managing conflicts.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| I assume that "decent" in the comment meant to address
| that?
| viraptor wrote:
| It would have to be _magical_ not just _decent_. This is
| not solvable on the level of the file system. You can 't
| add a blue line to an image on one system and a red line
| on another system and expect the filesystem to somehow
| figure out how to handle that on its own. The best you
| can count on is the conflict being flagged with both
| versions exposed.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| CRDTs?
|
| Perhaps the idea of plain text/binary files is a little
| outdated too.
| viraptor wrote:
| CRDT is extremely format-specific. File systems don't
| operate at that level. And that's before we even decide
| if the merged edits is what you actually want.
| gw99 wrote:
| That would have been nice. Cached 9P perhaps.
|
| Instead we got OneDrive, Dropbox and iCloud. Ugh.
| rand49an wrote:
| But then you have to deal with conflicts in a sensible way
| that won't lose users files and make it simple enough for
| people to choose which files to synchronise.
| Rygian wrote:
| Couple of buzzwords that address this point:
|
| * CRDTs
|
| * "Intelligent Edge Platforms" as Ditto [1] calls them
|
| [1] https://www.ditto.live/
| api wrote:
| > What we need is not cloud desktops, or cloud storage. We need
| local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and vendor
| agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices.
|
| That's absolutely spot on. The problem is: who is going to pay
| for it?
|
| No vendor will do this because it would break lock-in, and
| building something like this _and making it polished enough for
| widespread adoption_ is far beyond what pure volunteer open
| source can reasonably accomplish.
|
| The problem is economic, not technical. There is no business
| model for user-empowering software anymore.
|
| Software is extremely costly to produce but we pretend it's
| free and won't pay for it directly, so instead the industry has
| deeply wrapped itself around business models in which we are
| the product or that use lock-in to force payment eventually.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Quite a few complex solutions (mostly unknowingly) used by
| vast amounts of people have come from pure volunteer open
| source work.
|
| How much we can expect that to continue is a whole other
| matter though.
| api wrote:
| If you dig deeply you'll see that a large fraction of that
| is actually employees at big companies, universities, and
| governments. In other words it's subsidized. Any on the
| clock OSS work is a subsidy. It's not pure volunteer.
|
| This tends to be done when there is a strong common
| interest, but it's almost always for deep tech and dev
| tooling stuff. I have never seen an open source consumer
| product subsidized in this way because consumer lock in is
| where the money is.
|
| You will never see an open Uber, Ring, or Alexa unless a
| way can be found to charge for it. As it stands free means
| "as in beer" more than freedom and nobody would pay for
| such a thing.
|
| I have played with stuff like Home Assistant. It's not bad
| if you are technical. A non-techie could never deploy it.
| jawadch93 wrote:
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