Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

I once bought a 32 core ThreadRipper and tried to get along with using a cheap £200 Windows 10 laptop to remote into the threadripper while in coffee shops and use the ThreadRipper to do my work.

The £200 Windows 10 laptop wasn't powerful enough, it was too laggy. Even on Wifi.

I love the idea of the X11 protocol. And I still love the idea of a web desktop. Something that is supremely well integrated and allows me to move workloads between client and server seamlessly. This idea I really like. The ability to outsource computation and storage seamlessly. A process can be moved between machines seamlessly.

This could be modelled in Javascript and promises that can be sent around. Microservices in the desktop environment.

I looked at tools that would bring up tmux sessions with everything preloaded. (https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator)

ScrapScript has very good ideas in this area of distributing dependencies and storage. (https://scrapscript.org/) There is also val town.

I never use KDE Plasma widgets or the sidebar widgets that Mac provided.

There is so many exciting ideas that could be tried out but I worry they're all too big ideas to be implemented.

There's Greenfield, a web based Wayland compositor. It has a shim on your machines that uses webrtc or websockets to stream Wayland to the browser. Awesome fricking project. Been around for a while & author @zubnix keeps slowly honing it. https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29239781

It so has a local wasm mode, so you can build Wayland apps that live & run on the web. Examples in webgl & wgpu. Sick.

I have been using a remote workflow for more than three years.

I don't use remote desktop. I just SSH into the machine and use tmux sessions for terminal stuff and the vscode remote package for editing. To help the workflow I have some nice aliases for easily opening projects, forwarding ports, sleeping/waking the server etc.

I'm aware that this workflow cannot work for everyone - for instance it won't work for developing desktop apps, but for web and app development it's really nice to have a powerful machine doing all the hard work.

I think many would be surprised by how much faster desktop hardware is. Especially when you put price into the equation.

A decade ago I was complaining about only having so many GB of memory on my machine while developing our Java terror tech stack.

An ops type person overheard & mentioned we had some mostly unused beefy as heck remote desktop machines running NoMachine, which was a nice slick fast proxying X vdi thing I already loved. I was so happy.

It really let me work anywhere. At crazy speeds. Loved it.

These days I definitely am almost all ssh based. Back then though I basically needed Eclipse(+eclim).

X11 and VNC are still too inefficient for today's internet cafes. Take a look at: https://kasmweb.com/kasmvnc

I've tested the bulit-in VNC between two MacBooks, and it was an extremely high quality image, extremely fast and extremely responsive. To me the performance was completely unexpected. In what uses is VNC lacking?

Interesting. Linux desktop really suffers from not having something slick as RDP on Windows. VNC isn't performant enough, I've found the open source RDP servers to be buggy and reattaching to a session sometimes doesn't work and can cause crashes (at least on my Fedora install). VNC can do the same sometimes attaching to an existing session.

At the moment I use Windows as a jump box to do remote sessions to my Linux development VM, which is on the same local network.

Something that works well over a decent internet connection and can reliably re-connect to an existing session would be great.

ThinLinc has always worked pretty well.

I use NoMachine for Linux to Linux remote desktop, which feels almost as good as RDP for Windows on LAN and workable, but not quite as slick as RDP over lower bandwidth internet.

I've tried VNC, x2go, xpra, and NoMachine has been the best experience. NoMachine also has a free Windows client-only installation hidden somewhere on their website.

>The £200 Windows 10 laptop wasn't powerful enough, it was too laggy. Even on Wifi.

Any x86 computer in that price range is going to be hot garbage. You get what you pay for, and wifi has nothing to do with it.

I agree with you that a *NEW* machine at that price point running Windows will not be a great experience...but, I've purchased older, refurbished machines at that price point, and then loaded a lightweight linux distro and a lightweight desktop environment, and it works wonderfully! Of course, that's not for everyone i suppose.

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