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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

#371

Post by NoGravitas »

eloisant wrote: post #301
zasdffaa wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Typing should be less demanding, I'd think. Not really, unless you're the kind of guy working in Cobol and who is used to typing with latency. I've seen Cobol developers just ignoring the latency, keeping typing because they know what they've typed and it doesn't matter that it's slow to show up on screen.

> I've seen Cobol developers just ignoring the latency, keeping typing because they know what they've typed and it doesn't matter that it's slow to show up on screen.

I used to do that (not in COBOL), typing into a text editor in a terminal over a 2400-baud modem. Like the other commenter said, you get used to it, but it requires a certain predictability in your environment that you don't get in modern GUIs.

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

#372

Post by vineyardmike »

systemvoltage wrote: post #279
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…

> 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.

It’s probably the minority, but I think there are people who it’s helpful for.

For example, I travel with an iPad Pro and a work laptop. If I want to tinker one evening, I can use my iPad instead of bringing a personal laptop. (This also applies to cloud gaming for some people, but I haven’t done that personally).

My partner is also a software engineer and we have a toy server at home with various things running in it (eg game server, home assistant, vpn etc). We have a VSCode instance running so either of us can grab a browser and update the configs, without deal with being in sync. (Imo this is the “most obvious” use case - modifying remote files without worrying about sync).

At work, I also have this setup. (My school had something similar too, just less polished because it was a while ago) The benefits there are big too. Besides everything mentioned before, it also means that there’s basically zero setup time. If you break your laptop, or forget it, or whatever, IT just hands you a temporary chrome book which you log into your work from a browser.

By comparison, my old job pushed a bad MacOS update that bricked my work computer, and they made me remote into a windows VM (AWS workspace) from my personal laptop to do work until a replacement arrived. I lost all my work/files/etc since it bricked unexpectedly, and that job had remote Linux VMs so I had two levels of indirection. Then I had to set everything up again, so I easily lost 3+ weeks of work due to that incident.

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

#373

Post by cbHXBY1D »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #340
gimme_treefiddy wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yeah, to be clear for Google work I am talking about the combination of Cloudtop (VM), Cider (IDE), Blaze/Bazel (Builds). In addition you also need a version control / file sync system. It's also nice to have some kind of network proxy especially if you are doing web dev. Tools or web services run on the VM and you just access it directly through the proxy on your local browser. The integration/combination of these i…

You also should mention the use of CitC. With CitC, I can build/write code from my work machine at the office and then go home and gmosh into a cloudtop that uses the same network mounted filesystem.

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

#374

Post by NoGravitas »

jhickok wrote: post #112
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop? I've travelled to and through countries ( e.g. in the Gulf, France, India) with my work laptop where I was deeply uncomfortable having those data on hand. Taking a clean machine and remoting into that one when needed removes a lot of paranoia points.

I don't think you need a remote desktop in order to keep the data off the machine.

Yeah, I'd much rather deal with a local desktop and a remote filesystem, for sure.

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

#375

Post by AtNightWeCode »

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.

Worked with Citrix for years at different customers. Think it is more about setup. Server capacity, bandwidth and so on. Often Citrix was used for connecting to a bastion or a jump host. Then an extra hop to the target machine. Some setups were laggy. Some worked just fine.

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

#376

Post by Izkata »

rollcat wrote: post #358
babypuncher wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://aresluna.org/keyboard-secrets/typing-delay/

After using xterm for years, I don't like gnome-terminal anymore because its lag while typing has become noticeable. It's right around 30ms on this site, and xterm around 10-20ms.

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

#377

Post by vineyardmike »

systemvoltage wrote: post #328
paxys wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Latency is top priority for me.

VSCode is super popular and performant. It runs in a browser (electron) natively. Running it in chrome remotely is literally no different if you have a performant network.

I always found VSCode to perform better than IDEA based tools fwiw, especially if you want to keep a laptop on battery. Latency has never been an issue.

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

#378

Post by vsareto »

gjm11 wrote: post #267
vsareto wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.)

I'm saying they're not going to see the logic of saving time with better equipment when they're complaining about people slacking off remotely.

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

#379

Post by vineyardmike »

systemvoltage wrote: post #293
arcbyte wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a website with a worker process doing RSS parsing that occasionally fails. It would be quite nice to be able to spend 10 minutes fixing trivial bugs from my phone while I'm out and about. Or from my iPad. I'm not doing feature development but this would be nice to have for things that are so easy I could do them now but instead must wait hours or days until I'm back in front of my dev machine. And actually I h…

I mean there are always going to be niche uses for this. My point is about corporations adopting this sort of a thing because executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time. It sounds so damn good on paper vs. reality.

> executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time.

This isn’t the pitch. Not at all. The pitch is “no code (or IP) on local machines that can be stolen” and “no downtime if laptop breaks… IT desk can keep a stack of chrome books ready for backup”. Combined with something like gmail and google docs, the laptop at some employees WFH house contains no business secrets ever.

I’ve never experienced the slightest drag of latency with this approach. If you’re running a compiled language, the compiler is surely the bottleneck. If you’re doing it for work, they’ll probably set it up so it’s always regionalized close to you from a cloud. Maybe fly.io should pitch this.

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

#380

Post by zasdffaa »

pleb_nz wrote: post #314
zasdffaa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While my post was wrong, in fairness the context was specifically about keyboards. Nothing to do with audio. I suppose I should have been explicit but the context was keyboard entry.
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