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Comment by davidjhall | Hacker News Reader

I read the headline quickly and thought this was building a Linux Desktop on the Cloud and thought it would discuss hosting a performant desktop dev environment on AWS/DO/Azure. Anyone have great success with that?

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I do! It's my default way of working.

Thinclient: ~$200 Monthly Computing cost: ~$5

I'm broke so I bought a $200 chromebook, threw linux on it, that's my thinclient.

I issue credentials and spin up VMs from my thinclient with terraform or bash scripts using awscli/

When I have to, I use VSCode remotely with tools from https://github.com/cdr.

I also use the awscli to make Cloud9 instances for disposable dev environments, playing with a new language for example.

If you want to do native Linux over web and you have decent latency/bandwidth, you can spin up a vm and use Apache Guacamole, basically RDP/VNC through the browser over https.

Then I use my browser (Firefox ftw)

I also use twilio exclusively for phone/sms ($<10 per month)

Tried that with a fully specced out machine. It doesn't matter if VNC, X11 XDMCP, Teamviewer, Anydesk or some of the more obscure things I tried out. The latency kills all the fun.

What about a machine with an Nvidia GPU? The game streaming latency is surprisingly good assuming you're in the same region.

Yeah I think this only works for edge computing (eg <5ms from you). Very interesting space for the future though!

I'm very much reminded of this:

https://www.geek.com/chips/john-carmack-explains-why-its-fas...

> The latency kills all the fun.

I've found that while it changes the constraints on what is fun, some fun is still possible, and the ability to preserve state across devices/locations sometimes offsets the 'loss of fun'

e.g. coding / light 'ops' stuff that is just 'graphical text' is fairly bearable to me in the ~100ms range with good compression/low bandwidth settings, since often you can blindly type some code/commands and take a breath while the UI updates. Video/Graphics/Etc or heavy GUI interactivity starts to get a bit painful.

one clear benefit to cloud is faster in-cloud bandwidth/latency which could make up for the less responsive UI depending on your use case

Obviously you can get work done with it, I also can imagine that getting accustomed to a type and think about it approach while taking a breath might be worth the ability to preserve states. For me preserving states across devices/locations has been solved 10 years ago, though nowadays in extreme situations I just don't do any work if it's not my device. I won't enter any credentials on a device that's not mine or hasn't been in my physical control since being setup. I'd rather fly home. Nothing we do is that important.

For me a low latency is the single most important thing when using a computer. Having 1000hz input device rate on the mice, proper NVMe SSD and 144hz/240hz Display rate makes all the difference of a decent computer experience.

Several years ago I had pretty good luck with the NXMachine server/client for a training system. I don't know if they still offer a free version or not :(

Yeah, NoMachine NX, used the free version ~2010, it was lightyears ahead of any other remoting solution for Linux. Presumably, the commercial product still is but there is no free version anymore. There was a freenx project but it seems not much alive now. A different open-source project called x2go continues. The implementation seems less complete and stable but nevertheless, still a decent option for accessing a Linux desktop remotely over a lower-bandwidth (e.g. 3G mobile) connection.

We (https://www.paperspace.com) have full Linux and Windows desktops with web-based streaming and web-based terminal access. Might be what you are looking for :)

That's what I was thinking as well.

Linux is a tougher nut to crack. I've done Windows VM on a dedicated I leased for 60$ a month, with other VMs on the same box. That was over an ssh tunnel, and I found it pretty performant. I mean notable latency, but remote desktop supports multiple monitors.

Lib virt with spice supports open gl acceleration for local host connections. That works almost as well as RDP, expect it can only be run locally. I still need to check into xRDP. But Linux as a remote desktop, developer environment is pretty far behind windows from what I've seen.

For Linux central dev environments I go back to ssh + vim

I build tooling for a team in a Fintech company that does exactly this, but on an Enterprise level. Right now, there's too many issues, I'd say, to make this a viable alternative to just developing on a local client or self-hosted desktop. There's tons of cost-saving potential though, and I definitely think it'll be the norm in the future.

This is also what I thought :(

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