Reading his description of the issues, it sure sounds like they're as good as I'd think. I'm more optimistic about the gitpod-style remote development environments, honestly. But that post describes exactly what I expected from a "cloud desktop." I wouldn't expect someone to get much done if I inflicted that kind of work environment on them.
Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
161–170 of 479 posts
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
sadly, the job of a CISO typically isn't "make the most pragmatic decisions possible to keep our infrastructure secure and running smoothly". In many industries, it's more lke "join as many compliance programs as possible to expand the ability to capture revenue from regulated markets".
The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for did
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't that just a characteristic of how they're evaluated? Any security error is the CISO's fault, "heads must roll", etc
Given that, they're likely to give you what you are asking from them: a brick with no functionality which will do nothing. You can't do anything with Brick, but Brick has zero outstanding CVEs
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#164Not a fan of cloud desktops or any "virtualized" desktop. Experience is typically subpar and the worst part is that it requires a stable internet connection. What's the point of that when many of us are working remote and mobile?
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#165With 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…
I would also like to know this. I'm interested in doing fintech development... but there's no amount of money someone could pay me to use a consistently laggy environment. This thread is making it sound like it's commonplace.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#166I 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…
> 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.
I feel this so much.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#167[deleted]
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'd love to do that, but my laptop's and workstation's state inevitably get out of sync leading up to "wait why doesn't this work ... spend a couple of minutes .. ah yes I did X on the other device". (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-) And VNCing into my workstation from the laptop has all the drawbacks that Matthew described in the article.
My main professionnal OS in a Linux booting up from an nvme drive with an usb3 case adapter. The pro laptop I have been given only has a screen resolution of 1366x768 and 16GB of ram. I don't mind too much when using it as a desktop because I have 2 fullhd 24" screens but if I plan to be more mobile and work on one screen, or if I need lots of memory to boot containers and VMS I boot it on my personnal Lenovo. I also boot it sometimes on a desktop in my office while I boot the original windows installation of the pro laptop updating itself and not be forgotten.
I use adhesive velcros so that the drive is secured on the backside of the screen and don't hang from the laptop.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#169This also requires access to a stable fast network at all times. Local internet goes down, AWS/AZURE/GCP goes down and I'm stuck. With my laptop setup, I can work anywhere anytime, as long as I have power. I'll need network access at some point to commit code or pick up changed libraries, but that can be managed.
Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think
#170Multiple times I've caught coworkers starting a gotomeeting/zoom meeting in their VDI and they can't figure out why they can't use their LOCAL USB conference microphone/speaker array.
Yet another use case where VDI falls down.