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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

#51

Post by Frost1x »

dijonman2 wrote: post #22
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.

My work environment has a set of tasks that need to run exclusively in a tightly controlled cloud desktop environment. It's a nightmare.

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

#52

Post by romeoblade »

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 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)

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

#53

Post by Jorge1o1 »

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…

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.

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

#54

Post by oriolid »

jasode wrote: post #42
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…

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.

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

#55

Post by AshamedCaptain »

dijonman2 wrote: post #22
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.

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_.

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

#57

Post by AshamedCaptain »

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.

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.

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

#58

Post by atentaten »

Shorel wrote: post #41
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 stil…

How does pCloud differ from Dropbox?

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

#59

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

tinodb wrote: post #48

> 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 Pr…

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.

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

#60

Post by jagged-chisel »

jasode wrote: post #42
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…

> 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.

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