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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

#41

Post by Shorel »

Rygian wrote: post #3

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. *…

> 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.

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

#42

Post by jasode »

Rygian wrote: post #3

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. *…

>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?

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

#43

Post by jeffreygoesto »

viraptor wrote: post #34
Huh1337 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume that "decent" in the comment meant to address that?

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

#44

Post by joshxyz »

destroy-2A wrote: post #31

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.

Traumatically well written lol

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

#45

Post by terinjokes »

GiorgioG wrote: post #29
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.

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.

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

#46

Post by BozeWolf »

GiorgioG wrote: post #29
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.

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!

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

#47

Post by Huh1337 »

viraptor wrote: post #34
Huh1337 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CRDTs?

Perhaps the idea of plain text/binary files is a little outdated too.

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

#48

Post by tinodb »

> 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.

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

#49

Post by pbronez »

gw99 wrote: post #21
spaniard89277 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…
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