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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

#391

Post by aleksiy123 »

Kamq wrote: post #334
madrox wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but if learning X beforehand required learning Y, then we might be expecting the value of learning X to be the combined value of learning X + Y. It should be noted when adopting this approach, that you're lowering the expected value from the people who make it through the funnel. This may be counteracted by more people making it through the funnel, or it may not. The delta in total value is completely unknown.

I think the problem here is ordering. At the end we probably want them to know X and Y but we would rather they learn X then Y.

But to learn X they need to do some steps from Y.

If we can remove those steps we can make more people learn both.

But also in practice I don't think anyone struggling to set up their env before writing a line of code is learning much. They are just following arcane instructions until it works.

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

#392

Post by aleksiy123 »

danans wrote: post #298
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> you run/test in a terminal Some of the software has a GUI, and some of the tools (i.e. unit test runners) display their output in a locally (to the remote desktop) running web app viewed via a browser. If I were doing strictly text-based work, I might use tmux, but to be honest i3 scales down so well to the text-only use case that I probably wouldn't bother, since there is no upside to doing so.

For tools with webapp output. You can use a proxy to access it in your local browser.

Something like ngrok would work well.

The advantage of having tools with APIs

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

#393

Post by rfoo »

petercooper wrote: post #341
paxys wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they be paying for it out of pocket?

I don't know about Google, but as far as I heard, AWS folks pay for their own AWS resources for side projects, at least.

Google too.

Microsoft does give cloud credits per month for employees tho.

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

#394

Post by aleksiy123 »

jdelman wrote: post #386
paxys wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they be paying for it out of pocket?

They said they were using it for side projects. Even if Google is subsidizing the bill, I'm interested to know how much something like this would cost.

Google does not provide any discounts for employees personal projects.

Cloud Shell is free up to 5GB additional storage is $0.02/GB a month.

Alternatively someone linked https://www.gitpod.io/ which also has a free tier.

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

#396

Post by aleksiy123 »

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?

Here is the product https://cloud.google.com/shell

It has a quick start guide and docs.

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

#397

Post by ElFitz »

api wrote: post #82
Rygian wrote: post #3

It is good that these "water is wet" statements get written down so we can point humidity-skeptical people to them from time to time. The deeper problem is the sad state of affairs of distributed computing for the end user : * Application instances expect to be the only ones modifying the files that underlie the document being edited. Most of them simply bail out when the files get modified by another application. *…

> What we need is not cloud desktops, or cloud storage. We need local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and vendor agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices. That's absolutely spot on. The problem is: who is going to pay for it? No vendor will do this because it would break lock-in, and building something like this and making it polished enough for widespread adoption is far beyond what pur…

Quite a few complex solutions (mostly unknowingly) used by vast amounts of people have come from pure volunteer open source work.

How much we can expect that to continue is a whole other matter though.

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

#398

Post by iosjunkie »

hasel wrote: post #160
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…

What’s the input latency like in those cloud games?

You can try it for yourself with Nvidia’s GeForce Now free tier. Just connect with Ethernet if possible.

My experience is that it’s definitely playable and beats a low power laptop with an underpowered video card. Latency in the 40ms range, and barely perceptible.

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

#399

Post by arcbyte »

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.

As a director in a previous job a few years ago I almost introduced apache eclipse orion to our organization strictly to reduce issues with onboarding and junior devs.

I love when senior devs can set up their workspace how they like, but juniors and onboarders often need lots of handholding. Being able to spin up an IDE with exactly what they need with zero effort is incredibly valuable. We lost days and days of productivity because some developers didn't understand how to manage having both a jre and jdk on their machine.

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

#400

Post by gcatalfamo »

NoGravitas wrote: post #374
jhickok wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd like that too, but can you give me a working example that is not based around using a VPN, or editing documents on the browser?

(which are both viable, but there is a different number of drawbacks to each)

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