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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

#151

Post by make3 »

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.

wtf do you do with your CODING workstation that a M1 computer can't do?

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

#152

Post by mwcampbell »

I'm glad he brought up accessibility. My company has been working on a remote desktop product [1] that addresses this issue, particularly for blind users. The connection carries audio output from the remote machine, and the keyboard input handling code on both sides is designed to work with the quirks of screen readers, so running a screen reader on the remote machine works well. Beyond that, if the remote machine isn't running a screen reader, there's a way to get speech output on the controlling machine using the open-source NVDA screen reader for Windows, without requiring audio output on the remote machine. We still need to work on Braille output and screen magnification, and we've only started thinking about alternate input methods, so this doesn't cover everything, but the problems are solvable.

[1]: https://getrim.app/ I don't normally self-promote commercial products like this, but this is relevant to the article, and I thought people might find it interesting.

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

#153

Post by BenjiWiebe »

the8472 wrote: post #96

Another one is an unholy confluence of corporate compliance bullshit Connecting to the remote machine needs to go through corporate SSO (in a browser) that then starts the native remote client. Policy requires MFA, strong, frequently changed passwords and Windows Hello on the laptop. Policy also requires screen lock after 5 minutes. For some reason policy also requires disabling copy-paste to remote machines. The end…

Does your password manager have an auto-type feature?

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

#154

Post by VyseofArcadia »

mgkimsal wrote: post #144

Have generally been skeptical of 'cloud desktop' but... I had a friend who got in to sales for a cloud desktop provider about 6-7 years ago. There was only one real strong use case and she sold to that niche. Some specific cad/modeling/rendering vertical had software they used, and it was a CPU bear. Running that 'remotely' in the cloud was much faster than anything they could have locally. Managing all the licensing…

I worked in architectural CAD for a number of years (as a software engineer, not an architect), and this surprises me. Sure you needed a PC with a little bit of beef to work in it smoothly, but not unaffordably beefy. A not all that recent macbook was good enough for pretty much all of our customers. I left the company in 2019, and plenty of people were still working on a 2012 macbook on the latest version. My own dev machine was a 2015 macbook.

We did offer cloud rendering as a subscription service, but most people just did big renders overnight, and that was usually animations, not single-frame renders.

I'm curious which CAD software is such a bear that cloud desktop was worth it. Whether the particular industry was just that incredibly complex, or if the product was just slow and inefficient.

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

#155

Post by alchemist1e9 »

I don’t see Xpra mentioned in comments yet.

Works pretty well for us since remote windows and local are seamlessly integrated and managed by local WM. Solves the multi monitor issues. Definitely lower latency than vnc or rdp or nomachine from our testing. Windows, Mac and Linux clients all work well.

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

#157

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

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 recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be attributed to them.

Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge themselves into the halls of power and then start making decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that much.

I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a way they themselves did not.

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

#158

Post by lupire »

Not bad article, but intro deeply confuses the issue. If you want fast builds for your org, use a build server farm that is much faster than the fastest workstation, and sma incremental builds locally or on your cloud desktop. A local UX machine (15" Mac not built in the Dark Ages of 2016-2020, + desk monitor, good for 5+ years) with a FUSE mounted remote storage and a build farm is a great combo.

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

#159

Post by boppo1 »

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.

What kind of banking? Tell me people aren't doing excel modeling through a laggy pipe

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

#160

Post by hasel »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #69

With cloud gaming you can stream 4K games at 60FPS, with clarity and quality for fast moving objects. Why does remote desktop still shit itself when I move around MS Word with a few pictures? I know a tier 1 financial company that offer 100k / year developers a slow VM and from there you have to log into another VM. The VMs are dual core, 8GB. I watch in horror as each keypress takes more than a second. The amount of…

What’s the input latency like in those cloud games?
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