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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

#181

Post by afavour »

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.

> Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday.

Got to take exception to that. I'm a developer developer an I'm still required to get up from my desk to attend meetings etc, and I need my laptop in them. Or pair programming. It is usually a different kind of work so there's probably a world where I could have a desktop and a laptop but inevitably I'd end up needing to do something the iPad can't do and get frustrated.

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

#183

Post by jabroni_salad »

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…

If your definition of zero trust includes the endpoint devices because they are in an area that the general public can access.

If you want access to your desktop from multiple locations. Ex, at my local hospital the staff can tap their badge to any computer and instantly reconnect to their desktop exactly where they left off.

If you are in a multi-site scenario but your big LOB app hates the internet so you need all your clients to be in the same building as the server. This is actually the reason I deploy vmware horizon... im not sure what jack henry and Fiserv are doing to make their overblown CRUD apps so network heavy and inefficient to operate, but I'm happy they are finally rolling out their own cloud-first apps so they can deal with their own garbage instead of outsourcing their support to their customeres IT guys.

If you literally just can't acquire hardware because of a pandemic and need more compute than you have on hand.

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

#184

Post by NibLer »

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…

I would love a great cloud desktop. No worries about local backup, ability to use older hardware.

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

#185

Post by sascha_sl »

rcarmo wrote: post #32
spaniard89277 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it work out of the box? multiple screens? doest it work ok with subpar connections, like 4G? Just asking, didn't know about it. Currentry using Linux Mint, I guess I could try.

Yep. Once you edit the xrdp.ini file to enable the Xorg backend (which I've done recently on Fedora 36 and Ubuntu LTS), you're good. Multiple screen support depends on your client, I've had no issues with Windows and Mac clients. Audio depends a lot on your server distro (clients have it all sorted). Fedora uses pipewire, so YMMV. When using mobile connections I trim it down to 16-bit color and it is perfectly usable…

I had to switch back to Pulseaudio and compile the audio plugin for XRDP myself (that was on Fedora 35).

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

#186

Post by VyseofArcadia »

mgkimsal wrote: post #171
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

The details are hazy, and our paths don't cross any more, so I can't say for sure. Yes, overnights were still done in some cases, but they were able to do more 'in day' smaller renders (IIRC) that was making it worthwhile. IIRC... she done some consulting work for a particular firm, and they were investigating cloud stuff. When they chose that vendor, she saw how much of an impact that was making, and contacted the c…

The mystery deepens. I mentioned my mac because it's an easier comparison to make, but we were cross platform and I also had a contemporary ThinkPad. In fact, I worked mostly on the ThinkPad because I preferred Visual Studio to XCode.

Most of our customers did stick to mac, though. A lot of architects fancy themselves designers and really buy into Apple's marketing towards creatives.

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

#187

Post by dugmartin »

senko wrote: post #103
GiorgioG wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

If you do your work in VSCode you can setup the following pretty easily and it works really well (I use it to connect to my workstation in my home office when I work in a coffee shop on my laptop or the rare occasions I go into the office):

1. Install Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/) on your laptop and workstation and enable the "MagicDNS" (https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/) feature. This sets up a VPN mesh between your machines (and any other you add).

2. Setup you SSH keys so you can login via the "MagicDNS" domain name from your laptop to your workstation.

3. Install the VSCode Remote Development extension (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview) on your laptop and then open a workspace on your workstation via its SSH feature using the "MagicDNS" domain.

It is surprisingly fast - you are just sending keystrokes/commands over the VPN and not rasterizing the host screen like you would with VNC.

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

#188

Post by raxxorraxor »

just_boost_it wrote: post #39
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 quit a job because of citrix. Exactly like you said, very noticeable latency. It ate into my productivity as a part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen.

> part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen

This should not be underestimated. I was in a situation like this and I though my short term memory stopped working. I forget what steps I already did because some actions took 10-15 seconds. I often switched to another task in the meantime and could not recollect the last step I did 10 seconds ago. Such delays are poison for for intellectual task where you would need concentration for.

There is no excuse for any modern device to make such pauses. It is also far too expensive for any company. The price for hardware is too low to let any user wait.

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

#189

Post by dboreham »

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've never used Citrix but I remember when I had a T-1 (1.54Mbits for the younglings) and I left a Remote Desktop session open on a laptop. Some days later I went back to the laptop and used it for an hour before I realized I was in a RDP session to a machine in another state. I wonder what Citrix screwed up to make their UX so different. Of course a decent T-1 back then probably had better latency than today's consumer HFC connection.

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

#190

Post by marcosdumay »

icedchai wrote: post #172
jiggawatts wrote: post #86

Earlier 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…

How long ago was this? 4 megabits would be pretty good... back in 1998!

The last time I saw a place migrate the remote offices from a less than 10Mb/s network was around 2015. That same place replaced its mainframe at 2011 because of an enormous price hike.
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