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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

#121

Post by Rygian »

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…

> 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.

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

#122

Post by prepend »

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.

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.

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

#123

Post by 300bps »

d--b wrote: post #119

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.

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).

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

#124

Post by symlinkk »

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.

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

#125

Post by PaulKeeble »

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.

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

#127

Post by nefix »

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…

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 600€ and 1000€ (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.

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

#128

Post by acdha »

jiggawatts wrote: post #86
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.

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…

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.

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

#130

Post by methyl »

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.

> 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.

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