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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

#191

Post by qw »

8organicbits wrote: post #17

> Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud. I'd mention SSH port forwarding in this section. For webdev you'll want to run your server on the remote host and use the local web browser. SSH port forwarding works great for…

Jetbrains has support for remote development environments. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising.

https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/

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

#192

Post by cdkmoose »

anxiously wrote: post #173
cdkmoose wrote: post #169

This 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.

Maybe that is not a bad thing? If you don’t have internet then go for a walk. Touch some grass. I hope always being in a work state isn’t seen as a plus.

I can work remote from Maine for a week with limited internet access. I'm not working any extra, I'm just choosing what environment I want to work in.

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

#193

Post by irusensei »

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.

Hah now imagine using Teams through Citrix workspace.

One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup company with limited resources to handle all the bugs and crusty corpocrapware layers. The client craps on my HDR setup. It install a ton of crap you don't need and it relies on crap like HDX software running on your machine that last time I've checked it didn't had ARM binaries but this tech is also unavailable for the iOS clients. Meanwhile RDP can do semi-decent multimedia stuff without any of this crap.

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

#194

Post by marcosdumay »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #183
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…

You definition of zero trust can never include the endpoint devices. Those get to see everything you type on them, and have the same level of access to your services that its user has.

Instead, with a remote desktop you are only adding a bit more of vulnerabilities. It can never remove any.

(About those others, there exist some nice works about program portability, that culminated on fully distributed OSes, but those have no adoption. Instead, people prefer to hack distribution over the piles of hacks that are modern OSes. Obviously, it doesn't work well.)

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

#195

Post by indymike »

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.

> I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development.

I think there's a lot of cost/benefit that comes down to: depends on what you are building. I had lunch with a VR dev last week. He needed a big machine for huge MS builds. I do a lot of web and network programming, and a $1200 LG Gram (i7/32GB, 17" screen) is way more than adequate. The important thing is that employers understand that slow computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble developers with them.

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

#196

Post by pmontra »

I thought about buying a desktop again after almost 30 years, bury it in some room at my home and use my laptop as remote desktop. I work in different rooms as seasons go by (so no air conditioning), sometimes even morning vs afternoon. Not a common use case I guess but that's exactly the point of the article.

I think I'll keep using my laptop as primary and only machine because many of the scenarios in the article also apply to me and what if I have to visit a customer? It never happened again since the pandemic but it could.

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

#197

Post by ricardou »

jcalabro wrote: post #137

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 unperturb…

I have had the same experience, although I've only been out of school for two years. So far my daily work stream has me doing ssh to a Linux box and then doing my work there. All the CI/CD, version control, building code, and storing the code is done remotely.

So far it's been great (again, I've never had an alternative) and the power of virtualization has really come in handy. A couple of times in the past I accidentally borked my Linux box and started to figure out how to fix it, but then I had my d'oh moment: just scrap this one and get another!

There's no "it works on my machine" and most importantly, I can work from anywhere, with a stable internet connection (even using a phone to do USB tethering worked fine), from a Mac, a Chromebook, windows, whatever computer.

One caveat is that I program backends in C++ so a lot of the issues mentioned in the article don't really apply to me. Regardless, it's been great!

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

#198

Post by patrick451 »

moduspol wrote: post #79
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.

What development are you doing where there's a notable difference between an M1 Mac and a "workstation class machine?" Is it just running a bunch of VMs? I don't doubt the tasks exist but it's got to be a list that's been dwindling for the last few years.

At my job, our main software is a multi-million line c++ codebase. It takes most devs 45 minutes to an hour to compile without a fresh ccache, and this is a workstation with 8 physical cores. On my laptop, a fresh compile takes over 2 hours. This can be brought down to under 10 minutes with enough cores. Partly due to poor internal dependency management, it's pretty common that every git pull or rebase requires recompiling ~1/3 of the codebase and waiting multiple minutes to compile in an edit/compile/test cycle is common.

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

#199

Post by just_boost_it »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #188
just_boost_it wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's exactly it. Instead of tasks going "1, 2, 3" in my head, it was more like "1,...,1,...,1". I had to keep reloading every task into my working memory, with lots of brief pauses to think "did that click register", or "when I typed those words, was the context on that text box?". It's a truly torturous level of friction.

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

#200

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

Multicomp wrote: post #33
Huh1337 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally that would be handled on the FS layer and completely transparent to all apps. Things would get synchronized once connection is restored.

I mean, isn't that a potential usecase for Syncthing? If I go offline on one of my devices, my files are still locally on the system. When it comes back online, it re-syncs the other devices to use my latest files.

This is a very simple use case when you are working alone. Think about a team of people and hundreds of potentially conflicting changes to review manually.* Sometimes a tangible divide between online and offline is extremely useful.

*) Unless you believe this can be resolved by software - I'm afraid we're very far from that point yet.

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