Microsoft launches Windows App for accessing PCs in the cloud from any device | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft launches Windows App for accessing PCs in the cloud from any device

learn.microsoft.com

40 pointsmarban30 comments

I support having a sensible chuckle at Microsoft's sillier product names just like everyone else, but this is the first one that legitimately made me pause and think "they can't be serious." One of the reasons I clicked into this comment section was to figure out what was going on because the headline didn't make any sense.

> Windows App is available for Windows, macOS, iOS and iPadOS, and web browsers reads like an April Fools' joke.

Seriously, it's not possible to come up with a worse name other than the obvious Windows You Love Eating Turds etc...

How did this happen??!

Maybe they're trying to go for the "Windows anywhere" approach. So everything will be windows? Eg. But I have a mac! Just open windows and you're good to go.

Moonlight + Sunshine for a self hosted solution (streaming), works with every OS

server: https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine/

client: https://github.com/moonlight-stream

Oh this is specifically for game streaming! Might be nice to stream to the living room tv setup.

Do you have any experience with it? Any major bugs or issues?

I started using it just recently, so far so good, latency is pretty low and it's all configurable, I mainly use it for desktop usage, mostly programming windows/mac specific stuff (graphics stuff)

I’ve used it in the past and the results were pretty decent. I strongly recommend hardwiring everything to avoid stutters. Tried it over WiFi a couple of times, and it worked well for more moderate games, but heavy particles and things would cause things to turn garbled for a few seconds. Then again, 6E and the like didn’t exist when I used it so if your access point has the throughput it might not be a problem anymore.

I've had a great experience with simply TailScale and RDP. Add Duo 2FA to RDP if you like.

I use self-hosted Apache Guacamole (RDP) through a reverse proxy with Google SSO (oauth2-proxy[0]). So easy to access my desktop from virtually any browser (mobile isn't the best though). This would be a good solution for gaming, but for other activities RDP is unbeatable imo.

[0] https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

Anyone know if this be more responsive than an RDP-over-VPN solution?

When I connect to a computer on another continent, RDP kinda sucks. Teamviewer is more responsive, but it's not great either.

I use a ton of RDP over high latency low bandwidth connections. I think it works great. The pain points are application UIs that insist on doing fade effects or animations. That crap makes an RDP connection highly unusable. Using a browser across RDP to access any "modern" website is an exercise in frustration because of this.

It's meant for gaming with minimal input lag, so I suspect it would be better but much higher bandwidth usage too.

RDP is generally the best for low bandwidth (at least with a windows host) because it sends only the updated elements of the UI.

That's clearly the end game. Windows runs in their walled garden cloud, and you can stream it from any device. Zero customer control, zero ownership, you rent Windows and MS keeps all your files in their cloud, locking you in their platform.

I imagine we'll soon see very cheap, maliciously marketed devices that can only connect to Cloud Windows and be locked down from doing anything locally.

S mode already exists, and it's ideal for implementing this pure remote Microsoft centric vision. The rent-seeking has to stop.

The docs are appallingly bad.

Can I connect to my windows laptop from my Mac with this? Can I connect to my Mac from my windows laptop with this? The answers should be obvious. They are not (though I believe the answers may be there, and hopefully someone else can figure it out).

Edit added: GAH! Even for Microsoft these docs are inconceivably bad. It's not just the idiocy of the product naming. The docs start from the question of "Select a tab for the platform you're using" with no indication whether "the platform you're using" means the device you're connecting from or connecting to.

I'm pretty sure whoever wrote these docs read a blog post about humans once but has never actually met one.

They most likely used ChatBLT for the docs.

The naming does not help at all, they could've just called it "The window to Windows", since it's mostly a tool to connect to a Windows device ("PC", in their terms) from a Mac.

I wish they offered a Windows->Mac connector, as smooth and seamless as RDC (Windows->Windows). RDC is such a great and unbeatable solution, but it only works properly for Windows to Windows connections (Linux is doable, but experience is not great, not even close to native).

But they're clearly trying to get more Windows licenses sold, so they have no reason to support people doing work on other OSes.

I use RDP to connect from remmina to a Windows to run a 3d rendering application and after some tweaks it is near native to me. Although this one is a cheat since the Windows machine is a VM so literal best case latency and bandwidth.

I turned off all compression of the RDP which required some registry entry change. But I was kind of surprised.

I only did this because I needed GPU passthrough and couldn't get other mirroring techniques to work well with virt-manager.

Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager [1] has a reverse engineered Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) implementation that works fantastically. (Free SKU is enough.) No affiliation.

[1] https://devolutions.net/remote-desktop-manager/

They have an array of multiple confusingly named remote desktop clients that are in various levels of support and deprecation, and now they add yet another with another confusing name.

I love Chrome Remote Desktop for this use case. Works from mobile or desktop to Mac or PC. Very reliable.

Haven't used it, but multiple monitor support is really a nice feature.

The normal Remote Desktop Connection app (mstsc.exe) in Windows has this: go to Display settings, and select "Use all my monitors for the remote session".

I want to say the Mac client and the more modern Windows client also have it, but I can't remember.

What if I have 3 monitors and I want to only use 2 for the remote and keep 1 for my local?

You can select exactly which monitors along with changing the order of monitors. It does require editing the file directly though.

https://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-remote-desktop-in-full-...

Correct. I have done this on the Mac client and it is wonderful.

been using regular windows Remote Desktop with multiple monitors for years. if you have a decent network connection and your host is not on the other site of the world RDP is very performant.

Production: SSH + VPN/Wireguard Consumption: A web browser + VPN/Wireguard ( if desired )

I'm not sure where MS specific technology fits in. Great-grandparents still dialing into AOL?

horrified security blue team noises

Edit: ok I suppose this is no worse than RDP and whatever TeamViewer and other RAT tools exist.

not even linux? interesting how much they care

Reply on news.ycombinator.com