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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

#261

Post by zasdffaa »

acdha wrote: post #128
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…

I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to co…

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

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

#262

Post by TheTon »

vetinari wrote: post #175
methyl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine Not really true. My M1 Pro is performance-wise very close to my previous desktop based Ryzen 5900X, but: 1. It doesn't take space on or below my desk 2. Auxiliary screen it provides is useful 3. I can unplug it any time and continue working from anywhere with the same performance, without having to sync up…

I have M1 (the original) MBP and Ryzen TR2920X desktop (with oddles of RAM, multiple NVMe drives and 10 Gbps networking). The Mac, while significantly better than any Intel laptop I had before, still cannot hold a candle to the desktop, sorry. The desktop is much more power hungry, though.

It depends on your workload and codebase. I have a Ryzen 5600X in my desktop and for C++ work, my M1 Pro is quite a bit faster for clean or incremental builds. The desktop is still useful/required for some of my work (using x86_64 windows with an nvidia gpu) but I default to the Mac for anything that could be done in either place. It also helps that I prefer the Mac tools so it’s not just about the CPU speed.

That said, I’d rather find a new job than trade either system for a cloud desktop. I count myself fortunate that I’ve always been in a position to choose my computer and tools.

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

#263

Post by scarface74 »

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…

What type of laptop are you use to using where that would make your computer crawl? I have none of those issues with my current M1 MacBook Pro 16inch.

I have never heard the fan on my current MacBook. Now my older x86 one is a different story.

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

#264

Post by danans »

kfajdsl wrote: post #260
aleksiy123 wrote: post #259

I would have agreed until I started working at Google. Also, you should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and instead use ssh + an editor that works with remote files. At Google we have a custom fork of VSCode running in browser and builds can either be distributed or run on my Linux VM to utilize build cache. I liked it so much I started doing a similar setup for small side projects. Just boot up the Cloud Cons…

This is exactly the alternative that was presented at the end of the post. He was specifically against remote desktops.

Remote desktops can work great if you constrain and structure what you do in them.

For me, this means not using traditional desktop environments like gnome/kde/windows/macos, but instead a full screen tiled window manager (i3 in my case) with different virtual desktops assigned to different work items.

Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE (vim in my case) and a terminal session for the code under development in that IDE. That's it. No silly weather or chat widgets (all that lives in my local laptop's traditional desktop).

The result is I never have to search for a dev task related tab or be unsure if the code I'm running is the code I'm editing (which can happen if you are working on many concurrent changes).

I liken the setup to the keyboard-driven text terminals you still see in some shops, hotels, and airport check-in desks.

In general, I think smartly crafting your workflow matters a great deal more than the particular tool you might use.

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

#265

Post by Nimitz14 »

zasdffaa wrote: post #261
acdha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to co…

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

Under 100ms feels immediate. More doesnt.

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

#266

Post by marcosdumay »

viraptor wrote: post #34
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.

You can't just synchronise things without knowing the file formats. You can't do a seamless distributed FS which allows offline changes. Or more precisely, you can, but by choosing the most fresh file and people have lost work that way. There's a few "dropbox ate my files" stories out there.

That is usually handled by exposing a "driver" API where the relevant programs can install merging components.

And yes, default into choosing some one, with an extended interface for displaying and managing conflicts.

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

#267

Post by gjm11 »

vsareto wrote: post #209
indymike wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>The important thing is that employers understand that slow computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble developers with them. Sadly, that's not going to fly these days with those same employers thinking people slack off more often remotely vs. in the office.

If people are slacking off more when working remotely, then measures that make doing the job less frustrating seem likely to have outsized positive effects, by reducing that slacking-off.

(Maybe I'm assuming I'm more typical than I really am. I know that when the work I'm supposed to be doing is frustrating and annoying I feel much more temptation to do other things instead.)

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

#268

Post by scarface74 »

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.

Even in the bad old days when I did work in an office, we worked some days in the office and some at home.

Even now that I work remotely, I still go home to see my parents for a week at the time and work from there. I definitely wouldn’t want to be dependent on the internet.

Not to mention in less than a month, my wife and I will be doing the digital nomad thing working while flying across the country for a few years.

My set up includes a portable USB C powered external monitor as a second display and my iPad as a third display. Of course I have a Roost laptop stand.

If I need to spin up resources, I use my own (company provisioned) dev AWS account and it’s just there.

Even the last 60 person startup I worked at would let us set up dev AWS accounts with the appropriate guardrails for development.

We had CloudFormation templates to spin up environments as needed and we could just tear them down.

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

#269

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

danans wrote: post #264
kfajdsl wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the alternative that was presented at the end of the post. He was specifically against remote desktops.

Remote desktops can work great if you constrain and structure what you do in them. For me, this means not using traditional desktop environments like gnome/kde/windows/macos, but instead a full screen tiled window manager (i3 in my case) with different virtual desktops assigned to different work items. Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE (vim in my case) and a terminal session for the code under dev…

> Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE (vim in my case) and a terminal session for the code under development in that IDE. That's it. No silly weather or chat widgets (all that lives in my local laptop's traditional desktop).

I don't disagree, but if your editor is vim and you run/test in a terminal, why not do the whole thing in tmux in SSH?

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

#270

Post by mm007emko »

zasdffaa wrote: post #261
acdha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to co…

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

Not my experience. 300ms is noticeable and very annoying. 120ms does not feel instant to me.
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