Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtwo | Hacker News Reader

I hate citrix. It’s such a shitty aggravating user experience. Sometimes in the middle of the night with no load it almost works ok but it’s never good.

View on HN

In my experience this is almost always because your IT department budgeted terribly for their deployment and either didn’t get GPUs for graphics or is overextending their setup.

VDI should probably cost as much if not more than comparable workstations, but it’s so much more convenient in the best case.

That’s always the pitch that it’s not setup correctly but if most users are experiencing it in the incorrect setup then maybe it’s just the product. Like I said in no load it can be ok but never good. Sometimes the security might be a good trade off but only if users interact with the vdi rarely during their work day

It’s Always fun to get a support ticket about how software X doesn’t work. Look into it and opening up a browser is a multi minute task.

Eventually started closing such tickets with “buy a real computer” or other snarky remarks.

It's terrible even with GPU.

VDI can die in a fire.

We have a bunch of HDX 3D Pro VDIs at my current place and I second this.

A lot of times the issues are disk IO, 500 desktops all booting up and end-users opening applications at around 9:00am is a surprisingly huge amount of IO.

spot on. i did a brief stint as a xendesktop admin. it’s quite good if you throw big hardware at it, but so many places were cheap and overprovisioned the piss out of their underlying ESXi hosts (or did no resource scoping because surely the folks in accounting that mostly use Excel have the same IO needs as developers compiling multi gig projects in .NET) and they absolutely were not paying for PCoIP and/or GPUs (which you really only needed if low latency VDIs were a necessity)

The installation wizard for workspace and realtime engine on macOS installs 6 or more background services as root which you don't actually need if your provider just gives you an ICA file to login.

If you think the user experience is bad, you should try being a developer or sysadmin

I took a python class in a Citrix environment and It was incredibly aggravating. Watching code appear seconds after you type it fills you with so much rage. It’s like zoom fatigue before zoom

Reply on news.ycombinator.com