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.
Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
31–40 of 479 posts
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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).
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#33Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#34Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#35Give 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.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#36The 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.
> 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.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Looks good, I'll try, thanks.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#38It 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. *…
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.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#39Try 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.
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.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#40Try 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.
Ergh! You're giving me PTSD. I still recall those days shudder
Best of luck with that