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Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

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Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#21

Post by gw99 »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #15
gw99 wrote: post #11

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…

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.

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.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#22

Post by dijonman2 »

cardanome wrote: post #14

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 e…

Companies with strict data protection policies can force the usage of VDE for sensitive tasks, as part of a broader DLP program.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#23

Post by gw99 »

Huh1337 wrote: post #18
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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.

Ideally that would be handled on the FS layer and completely transparent to all apps. Things would get synchronized once connection is restored.

That would have been nice. Cached 9P perhaps.

Instead we got OneDrive, Dropbox and iCloud. Ugh.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#24

Post by robertlagrant »

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.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#25

Post by clarge1120 »

gw99 wrote: post #11

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…

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”.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#26

Post by rand49an »

Huh1337 wrote: post #18
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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.

Ideally that would be handled on the FS layer and completely transparent to all apps. Things would get synchronized once connection is restored.

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.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#27

Post by spaniard89277 »

rcarmo wrote: post #16
sascha_sl wrote: post #10

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.

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…

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.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#29

Post by GiorgioG »

simfoo wrote: post #13

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 nothin…

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.
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