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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

#311

Post by vlan0 »

ctoth wrote: post #294
aleksiy123 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one more point I would like to add to the "less friction to start." This is the killer feature for education. No more do students have to set up their own envs. Figure out PYTHONPATH. No more do educators need to debug installation issues on 3 different OSes. Teachers distribute a pre setup env which they know works for what they are trying to teach. Students go straight into writing code and building things…

Learning to set up my environment to compile my first MUD back in 1999 was my first introduction to Autotools, ./configure, make, etc. I was motivated to solve the problem because I wanted to tinker. I'm sure someone will say I'm gatekeeping, but seriously these low-level skills have served me my entire career, and I wonder what happens when every dev environment is just a docker pull away. Who learns how to build ne…

>Who learns how to build new environments?

Feels like this is happening already. There is no incentive to learn the fundamental concepts. We need more people interested in the why, and not just a quick buck. Folks interested in the why is the only reason we are here to begin with!

On the other hand....it's great job security! Less and less people understand networking everyday it seems!

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

#312

Post by gimme_treefiddy »

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…

Damn, when you said Google I thought you were gonna talk about Cloudtop, etc. +1 to your recommendation, but they do a pretty good job Cloudtop too(for non-power users it is pretty usable).

Also check out https://www.mightyapp.com/

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

#313

Post by theptip »

I have never got this set up, but I think a hybrid approach could be quite good; something like pytest-xdist remote SSH builders perhaps. (Maybe you can rsync the diffs in the background though, instead of when you hit the "test" button, to speed things up?)

https://pypi.org/project/pytest-xdist/#sending-tests-to-remo...

Running a local-first setup is nice for things like iteratively step-debugging your latest changes on a single test case, but being able to push the diffs to a fast remote build server (elastic cluster?) to speed up the "run all the tests" action would be nice.

I think you can do this with Clang remote builders too. I hear Bazel has this.

Is this something that anyone has experience with? It seems like it could be the best of both worlds, from a compute performance standpoint.

(As others have noted, the other big benefit of a cloud desktop is that you don't have to spend time setting up your dev environment, which is constant toil for new developers; Github mentioned this as a big contributor of friction in https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move....)

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

#314

Post by pleb_nz »

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.

Divide those figures by 10 might be closer to being accurate. 120ms is quite noticable. I know as I need to adjust latency out of Bluetooth headphones for recording. Recording with those latencies sounds like a disaster and is very very much noticable even with sounds let alone vision

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

#315

Post by viridian »

zasdffaa wrote: post #273
zasdffaa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was a bad post. The figure of 300ms was from memory. I guess it's complex but for games shmup games ( https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce... ): " ...for Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), real-time is a requirement. As online gaming matures, players flock to games with more immersive and lifelike experiences. To satisfy this demand, developers now need to produce games with very r…

Generally I think of it in terms of number of frames @ 60 fps.

Anything below one frame (16.66ms) and whether or not any sort of real feedback is even received (let alone interpreted by the brain) becomes a probability density function. With each additional frame after that providing more and more kinesthetic friction until you become completely divorced from the feedback around 15-20 frames.

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

#316

Post by Scramblejams »

babypuncher wrote: post #310
zasdffaa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is just flat out wrong. Any seasoned gamer can feel the difference between a few tens of milliseconds. 300ms would render most video games unplayable. I see this claim a lot and it's making me want to build a website that gives you some common interactions (moving a mouse cursor, pressing a button) with adjustable latency so people can see just how big of an impact seemingly small amounts of lag have on how resp…

Sounds excellent. I would send that link around to a lotta people.

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

#317

Post by AshamedCaptain »

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.

You simply get used to it. In many industry sectors (think CPU architects), multiple layers of inception is the norm (crossing multiple operating systems), and it is not strange for a keystroke to take 2 seconds, and for a menu to open and finish rendering in 10 seconds. This "experience" is probably the reason why I can still comfortably work over a DSL link with just network X (even though I still find NX much more comfortable).

You really just adapt your way of interacting, and start planning more carefully every one of your actions instead of simply clickety-clacketing everywhere like if you were trying to win a game of Starcraft. It's practically subconscious and it really changes you.

I always think it must be much, much worse for blind people.

It also reminds me of people who complain that 5-minute build times "impair their productivity". How do you even work on _any_ mid-sized commercial codebase then ? It's not that uncommon for a build to take hours (e.g. games), and in engineering it is also not that uncommon for builds to take _days_ even on powerful server farms.

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

#318

Post by pavon »

Looks like I'm in the minority here. I use a VMWare Horizon VM as my primary desktop environment, and I love it! Working from home, VMWare Horizon has much better performance than using a VPN for many things including X11 forwarding to Linux computers on-site, RDP to Windows computers on-site, and accessing CIFS/SMB file shares. And when I do go on-site, I can connect to it from any computer, either using a kiosk, or a colleague's computer if we are collaborating, or any conference room computer.

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

#319

Post by Maxburn »

easton wrote: post #219
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...

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that.

I just copy the link and bring it to the computer I'm using to open directly there.

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

#320

Post by Shorel »

Rygian wrote: post #121
Shorel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and vendor agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices. I am very happy with pCloud. One of the reasons I got it is: it works very well on Linux. It works on Android. It works on Windows. And it works in the browser, for things like video and photos. Also: no risk of trigger-happy account deletion like with Google, if pCloud dies my email stil…

> Previously I used OVH online drive service, but it was EOL and pCloud is the replacement. So a vendor has the power to disrupt you whenever they feel like EOLing the service you depend on. I understand that's as good as it gets today, but it's not good enough. For me, the only acceptable level of impact is as follows: * vendor X sunsets their service by date D * before date D, I sign-up for a new account with vendo…

That's how it happened. OVH announced the EOL about a year before the system was shut down.

pCloud is a replacement I choose, nothing to do with old OVH service.

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