Seems we are back to the mainframe era, or getting very close to it. I like to use my own tools, like emacs of vim, instead seems people will all be using the same tools (IDE/browser) for development if this goes mainstream.
Personally I find it very dystopian but I’m a child of the PC and early Internet era and the idea of personal computing always seemed magical.
On cost it’s like other capital assets: if you use it heavily and evenly it makes more sense to buy, but if you use it rarely or you need “burstable” use it’s better to rent.
Developing and running builds on a powerful remote system in a data center from your laptop is a game changer, as long as you have a good connection and low latency.
(at school they call me a "box hugger")
I can also provision VMs that are much more powerful than any reasonable desktop temporarily.
But most developers don’t use desktops any more do they? Even if you’re hybrid and were forced to return to office, you would still want a laptop.
The aggressively parallel automated testing is nice but I don't see why that requires the IDE in the cloud.
Or the thin clients that were all the rage for a week-and-a-half back in the late 90's.
Salesdroid: "Why spend $3,000 on each computer for your office, when you can use our thin client, which is only $1,500, including keyboard and mouse?"
Dell: - Starts shipping full computers for $299 -
What do you think restaurants, downtown shops, travel agencies, factory floor,doctors,.... are using?
Unless your definition of 'thin client's is 'anything with a browser regardless of whatever other software it runs'. Or unless you're counting stuff like electron as 'thin clients'.
There's ThinkCentre M, their small thin client segment, but that's a tiny part of the whole ThinkCentre line, which includes normal desktops and workstations.
Yes, it isn't something booting over tftp, with either green or Amber colors, or a X Windows Server terminal like the IBM ones.
It doesn't matter, they are configured and used just the same, and their resources are relatively limited compared to a random desktop.
So you invented your own definition.
For compliance with various anti-data-leak standards we currently use a very janky remote development setup at work. We're working on improving this situation while maintaining compliance. The thing I keep hearing from devs is "wouldn't it be nice if we could develop pn our Macs?"
I guess the bigcorps will have to deprecate and eventually stop development on local IDEs if they really want us to work this way, but I don't see that happening.
I have been doing VScode remote development for ages now and it is awesome. Even from a Chromebook
Well, it's Google Cloud Workstations. So you're already dancing with a devil. Might as well dance with two.
Unfortunately vs code has way too many things missing compared to JetBrains.
There was a short time between the transition of UNIX into Linux, and Citrix was growing up, that we actually used local development in consulting projects, coupled with RSA keys for access.
Around 2010, it was back into thin clients connecting to development VMs on Amazon EC2 instances.
So you just need to rent a VPS to get the same type of offering which is not a solution to IDE users.
There's nothing bad about IDEs.
Then there are options like theia or other self hosted workspaces.
Rendering can all be done locally with compute remote, only communicating minimal amounts of changes.
With my SecDevOps hat on, it would be as locked down as it needs for project delivery.