Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by gw99 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:27 AM UTC

Yep. Having worked in these environments, this solution is almost always sold to companies that are working around shitty hard to reproduce software stacks, staff trust issues, scale up difficulties and checkbox security cargo cults. The resulting outcome is usually increased staff turnover, increased cost and decreased productivity. Most of this they are having trouble rationalising or acknowledging still.

You don't want to work for those companies.

It's notably different if you have a cloud VM running linux and you're connecting to it with VScode or something over SSH. That's borderline acceptable. The reality is usually some horrible AWS, Azure or Citrix portalised solution however.

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

#12

Post by rcarmo » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:27 AM UTC

Funny that I should be reading this on such a "cloud" desktop.

I have a Raspberry Pi[1] running Remmina and accessing a number of different machines via RDP - A personal Fedora 36 desktop running in an LXC container[2], a Windows VM on Azure, and various other similar environments. I am typing this on that Pi, through that Fedora session, pushed to a 2560x1080 display. Typing and typical browsing is almost indistinguishable from "being there". Coding too. It is only noticeable (on the Pi) when large parts of the screen update and the little thing has to chug along, but I'd rather have this completely silent setup than an Intel NUC.

For work, I do have spanking new a work-issue laptop, but it is fairly recent and the fans spin up whenever I launch anything of consequence, so I am still logging in to a virtual desktop environment for everything up to (and including) audio calls (RDP has pretty decent audio support these days). Video and display sharing I still do locally, mostly because it's usual to switch environments during a call, but I have full multiple display support, and the connection can handle my 5K2K and 4K displays just fine.

I've been doing this for a decade or so, ever since I could use Citrix over GPRS. The user experience is fantastic - even at that time I could literally close my session in the evening, take a morning flight to Milan, pop open my laptop and continue where I had left off, over a piddling sub-64Kbps link.

With the right setup (and experience), latency issues mostly vanish. These days you can push a full 3D rendered desktop over DSL with either optimized RDP or game streaming, so the real constraints typically come from IT restrictions and people wanting to micromanage their environments.

That said, I also use VS Code Remote, and it works great for me as well over SSH. But it's just easier to spin up a VM/container and do that from my iPad :)

[1] - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/08/14/2030 [2] - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/02/2130

Edit: Remembered I shot this video of it running over Wi-Fi, unoptimized: https://twitter.com/rcarmo/status/1561397639215665153?s=20&t...

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

#13

Post by simfoo » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

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 nothing in comparison.

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

#14

Post by cardanome » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:29 AM UTC

I don't get the use case. Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop?

Even a very low-spec laptop is going to run a simple graphical desktop environment like Xfce just fine. Watching a youtube video, browsing the web and even video conferencing can be handled with any new-ish laptop.

And in reality, you still want a reliable laptop with decent keyboard, long battery life, good display and so on. So you won't end up on a low spec machine to begin with.

For computation heavy dev stuff a simple SSH access is good enough. It can be a very smooth experience with a locally running VS Code or something.

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

#15

Post by spaniard89277 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

gw99 wrote: post #11

Yep. Having worked in these environments, this solution is almost always sold to companies that are working around shitty hard to reproduce software stacks, staff trust issues, scale up difficulties and checkbox security cargo cults. The resulting outcome is usually increased staff turnover, increased cost and decreased productivity. Most of this they are having trouble rationalising or acknowledging still. You don't…

RDP works fine for Windows honestly, but in Linux the only decent solution is nomachine and sometimes not even that.

Anyway, in my company they decided to hand us out a company laptop and connect through VPN to the corporate network, with shared drives, and it's the best solution IMO.

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

#16

Post by rcarmo » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

sascha_sl wrote: post #10

I've done this for a long while, and I always come back to the only two viable competitors in the space (that don't require enterprise licensing). Nomachine and ThinLinc. Everything else is fine for the occasional remote desktop administration, but they all have a combination of bad video quality, no audio, no keyboard shortcut capture or bad scaling options.

You should really try xorgxrdp. It is now part of most modern distros, has good audio support, and excellent video quality (I can watch YouTube on a Pi running Remmina, using nothing but stock OS packages on both client and server).

One catch is that some distros (like Fedora), for some reason use the Xvnc backend to xrdp by default, which is idiotic. Just go into xrdp.ini and enable the Xorg section (get rid of the Xvnc one) to get things to work properly.

I personally cannot abide NoMachine (it was a spectacular fiddly failure for me many times, especially on Mac and Windows clients) and never found ThinLinc to beat the simplicity of RDP, especially considering the client software (I have very configurable RDP clients like Jump Desktop for iOS and Android that work perfectly with Bluetooth mice and keyboards, so I seldom pack a laptop these days).

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

#17

Post by 8organicbits » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:35 AM UTC

> Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud.

I'd mention SSH port forwarding in this section. For webdev you'll want to run your server on the remote host and use the local web browser. SSH port forwarding works great for this. I recently used this setup to get some extra RAM for a short project that could only be run as a collection of memory hungry microservices. This way I could get the whole thing running on one box; I spun down the server once the project was done.

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

#18

Post by Huh1337 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:36 AM UTC

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #8

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. While I agree, this by itself doesn't solve the problem when you depend on such a FS for your work in a way that when you lose network connectivity, you can no longer work.

Ideally that would be handled on the FS layer and completely transparent to all apps. Things would get synchronized once connection is restored.

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

#19

Post by rcarmo » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

spaniard89277 wrote: post #15

gw99 wrote: post #11

Yep. Having worked in these environments, this solution is almost always sold to companies that are working around shitty hard to reproduce software stacks, staff trust issues, scale up difficulties and checkbox security cargo cults. The resulting outcome is usually increased staff turnover, increased cost and decreased productivity. Most of this they are having trouble rationalising or acknowledging still. You don't…

RDP works fine for Windows honestly, but in Linux the only decent solution is nomachine and sometimes not even that. Anyway, in my company they decided to hand us out a company laptop and connect through VPN to the corporate network, with shared drives, and it's the best solution IMO.

See my other comment regarding xorgxrdp.

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

#20

Post by spookierookie » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

IMHO remote desktops (cloud or DaaS) is a terrible idea with even more terrible executions. I never tried one that could measure up to a local environment.