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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

#131

Post by jcelerier »

Rygian wrote: post #109
pluijzer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no affiliation but want to second this. If you want to keep your filesystem in sync across many devices Syncthing fully enables this. It is a use case where you would expect a payed service would be easier or more reliable but with Syncthing it is the exact opposite. Just install it on your devices and select the folders you want to keep in sync ... done. I had never had any problems with it something I cannot…

My filesystem consists of [checks du -h . | tail -1] 189 GB. I don't think Syncthing (which I love) can cram 189 GB on my 64 GB phone. Yet I expect to have access to my filesystem from my phone. Synthing is a nice "pump-hose system" between reservoirs of data. What I was arguing above is to stop having separate reservoirs of data to begin with.

I use seafile (similar to syncthing) and it allows to browse your data libraries without requiring a local copy for these cases

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

#132

Post by fideloper »

I think I found a good remote dev environment recently - basically "just use Mutagen to sync files to a server close to you". That keeps the source of truth (code files) local but outsources the compute.

I started working at Fly.io ~4mo ago and quickly realized I could setup a nice remote dev environment since there are regions close to me (super low latency).

I setup a VM to run SSH to sync/forward ports. It turn off when I'm not using it (after a configured timeout, it sniffs for SSH connections and exits if there are none - which stops the VM), and uses Mutagen to sync files. The source of truth is my local files, so my local IDE's work great (they're working against the local file system).

I wrapped it up in a little tool I'm calling Vessel https://github.com/Vessel-App/vessel-cli, which talks to Fly's "Machines API"

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

#133

Post by jopsen »

free652 wrote: post #50

I work at the company the gives a chromebook and a cloud desktop. Works great for me. VS Code for the development, SSH for the remote desktop, most of operations can be done via VSCode anyways. Chrome RDP is slow, I agree. I never use it anyways.

I have a fast laptop and solid desktop...

But I frequently use vscode+ssh+tmux on the desktop when working from home.

Then the powerful laptop just has to run chrome.. which to be fair, it barely does without crashing :)

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

#136

Post by josephg »

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. *…

I couldn't agree more. I've been working on CRDTs the last few years, and there's a huge opportunity here if we can reinvent the concept of the filesystem. Ideally, we'd replace files with CRDT-backed objects in the operating system. Then instead of fread / fwrite commands (which wastefully overwrite the entire file), applications could express semantic changes which get saved in a log.

Those changes can be transparently replicated between applications, between devices and between users. We'd get better performance on-device, and automatic, transparent device-to-device replication. And we could trivially enable realtime collaborative editing between users. Better still, if it happened at the OS level, we could make it work in every application on the system.

Right now "linux on the desktop" is slowly and inevitably dying in the face of cloud services. How would OpenOffice even compete with Google Docs? Do opensource application authors need to run their own web servers? (And if so, who pays for that?). If we replaced the filesystem with CRDTs, openoffice (and every other program on the desktop which edits "documents") could have best-in-class collaboration features, right there out of the box.

There's an opportunity here to build a really amazing computing system.

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

#137

Post by jcalabro »

For the past 5 years I've used a macbook to ssh in to a Linux VM as my development environment. It was great for the work that I was doing (distributed web systems).

Now that I've changed jobs and I'm developing a desktop app again, I'm back on a physical Linux box under my desk, and I really miss the old experience. It was great to never care about a mac change tanking your productivity (i.e. I was totally unperturbed by the m1 switch), and it was also great not to have to run a Linux desktop environment, which it turns out is still a big pain.

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

#138

Post by wongarsu »

yrgulation wrote: post #70
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some companies in UK still provide 1080p monitors of the lowest quality

In my whole career i only had one company that provided windows machines and as expected it was a horrible place to work at. Current client wants to do the same. Coincidentally the place is becoming less desirable to work with.

Outside of silicon valley, the business world runs on Windows, no matter how cheap or expensive the machines are.

Being inflexible can certainly be a red flag though.

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

#139

Post by hackrbrazil »

Remote code development tools like Gitpod and Codespaces may be a good answer to the issues from the post. They sit in the middle between purely using SSH and full remote desktop experience, so feel like using your local machine while giving you access to computing power from the cloud.

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

#140

Post by flanbiscuit »

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.

This is me right now, but only for a short time (I hope). I'm at an agency and currently on my first ever banking client. I'm on a Mac but I use Citrix Viewer to access a Windows 10 machine. The part I dislike the most is the context switching between Mac and Windows. First off, windows doesn't natively let you customize the keys (I can't install anything obviously, it's a bank client). Also, for some reason, the alt key doesn't work in the Citrix Viewer so I have to change a lot of my usual VSCode shortcuts to sone custom ones. I've googled the issue and some people on Mac use a program called Karabiner[1] but I didn't want to install yet another program, I'm just dealing with it for now.

Our agency has another banking client that I hear sends you a laptop, I much rather have that.

[1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

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