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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

#321

Post by temac »

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 M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine.

My M1 Pro is faster in some workloads than a small Dell tower sold as a "workstation". Of course I could buy a huge workstation with a 250W CPU or some kind of insanity like that, but then I suspect its power efficiency will be 4 times worse than the M1 Pro. The Dell tower already makes quite a good amount of noise under load while being beaten by a mostly silent M1 Pro.

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

#322

Post by bckr »

vlan0 wrote: post #311
ctoth wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

In my experience, "tinkering" with an environment before getting any code working was a recipe for believing "this is too hard, maybe I'm not smart enough to do this".

Getting a feedback loop early on is so important. Once you're convinced that you can write software, setting up an environment starts to look like a tractable problem.

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

#323

Post by Shorel »

atentaten wrote: post #58
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…

How does pCloud differ from Dropbox?

I paid for a lifetime subscription.

One payment and so far no complaints at all.

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

#324

Post by madrox »

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…

Think of it like a product funnel. If the goal is to get people to learn X, making them learn Y as a barrier first is unnecessary. You risk people abandoning the funnel that way. It's still entirely possible to learn these tools some other way.

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

#325

Post by samirsd »

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…

very cool! do you have a good guide you could share for setting that up?

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

#326

Post by patrakov »

jonfw wrote: post #162
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be attributed to them. Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge themselves into the halls of power and then start making decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that much. I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a way they themselves did not.

sadly, the job of a CISO typically isn't "make the most pragmatic decisions possible to keep our infrastructure secure and running smoothly". In many industries, it's more lke "join as many compliance programs as possible to expand the ability to capture revenue from regulated markets". The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for did

> The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for did

And it's the CISO job to resist unnecessary overcompliance which is just for the happiness of the sales team.

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

#327

Post by Dracophoenix »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #186
mgkimsal wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would've thought architectural CAD like Revit would be computationally heavy. What rendering engine(s) do you use?

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

#328

Post by systemvoltage »

paxys wrote: post #305
systemvoltage wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accessible from anywhere (I use my pc, my laptop, etc. The env is always the same) This is a feature in search of a problem for me. I never wake up in the morning and go “Gee only if I can code on random computers”. It sounds super nice but then I think about it a little more and it’s just fluff.

This is a very useful feature the moment you have > 1 development machine. Complex build environments, dependencies, personal preferences all syncing seamlessly between all of them is a godsend.

I already do that in pycharm. Everything else needs to be set once. But you’re actually arguing about multi-machines and I’m arguing about “code from anywhere” even on computers that don’t belong to you. That is an overblown feature that I’d never use.

Latency is top priority for me. It shall not be sacrificed for any multi machine inconveniences.

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

#329

Post by mox1 »

samirsd wrote: post #325
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…

very cool! do you have a good guide you could share for setting that up?

If you don't want to set it all up yourself, GitPod basically has this up and running, with a pretty generous free tier. Think VSCode in the browser, with a docker container (controlled by you!) bash prompt at the bottom.

https://gitpod.io/

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