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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

#211

Post by mvdwoord »

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…

Application streaming was and perhaps is still a thing. I remember the softricity days... (Not fondly as the process to prepare application bundles was cumbersome).

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

#212

Post by Test0129 »

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.

You nailed it. Portability. Also if you're working professionally it's far easier to collect your property as a company when you don't have to pay oversized shipping costs for a desktop.

Though rarely is a laptop in clamshell mode as good as a desktop. For certain things, I don't think they'll ever be. For example, graphics work and a lot of scientific work just isn't sufficient unless it's done on a desktop.

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

#213

Post by guhidalg »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #53
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…

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…

I don't understand when and why so much power was delegated to IT w.r.t installing software. The FSF needs to start fighting IT and device management policies before talking about open source software.

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

#214

Post by anxiously »

lupire wrote: post #158

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.

I used to think so, but I have yet to own a Mac that survived more than 3 years. However, that may have been partially due to the "Dark Ages", but more like 2014-2021.

I'm happier with something Linux friendly (thinkpad x220, pinebook pro, etc) and a remote system I use over ssh (sshfs, ssh+vim+tmux, etc). All at the great cost of ~$220 + $5/month?

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

#215

Post by raxxorraxor »

indymike wrote: post #195
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 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…

True, employment costs out-compete costs for hardware very quickly. If your employee takes 10 minutes per day waiting on tasks because the system is too slow, you can instead buy a pretty decent rig every year.

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

#216

Post by roywiggins »

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.

Maybe I'm immune to it, or just lucky, but two hops (Logging it at home to a Citrix Network Desktop to Remote Desktop to the PC in my office) has been shockingly fine. I live very close to the servers in question though, so speed of light isn't a limiting factor, and I have solid and reasonably fast home internet. It can work fine.

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

#217

Post by leokennis »

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 work in banking. Everything company-hosted I access via a split tunnel VPN. Everything else goes through the normal internet connection, with a company root CA inserted to sniff HTTPS traffic.

One of the lucky few I guess :-)

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

#218

Post by duxup »

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.

Are most development environments high performance / high computer utilization environments?

I was under the impression they were not.

I couldn't tell you if I was on a laptop or desktop when I'm docked ...

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

#219

Post by easton »

Maxburn wrote: post #170

Multiple 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.

Most of the video conferencing apps of choice have a version where they run something on the thin client to reduce latency (going from the thin client to Zoom or Teams or WebEx directly instead of through the VDI). They have support for the mics and stuff too.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/sections/4404192199053-Virt...

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

#220

Post by easton »

pwarner wrote: post #94
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…

I get a sense this model is the future, but also don't know if anyone using it at scale? Any examples out there?

GitHub uses it internally (using their Codespaces product, which also just lets you SSH directly into the VM it creates): https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move...
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