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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is just another opportunity to create new services. I've seriously considered moving all my stuff (except gaming) into something like apache guacamole. I'm already used to remote dev-ing over ssh and once you can easily get your desktop anywhere without even needing a client, there's no real reason to run everything on the one system you happen to be sitting at. And if internet connectivity is still an issue in your country you could even run this setup locally. Maybe find a way to sync it with a remote system. I'm pretty sure this is the future anyways.

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> there's no real reason to run everything on the one system you happen to be sitting at

theoretically.

in practice the added latency is a problem outside of casual use.

update: clarification seems to be neccessary as i was talking about audio/video/gaming type workload, NOT office stuff

Can you give an example? I haven’t ran anything for work on my Macbook locally in a long time.

The latency issue is increasingly disappearing or at least becoming negligible in most population centers. For example, in my country almost every company uses Citrix (no affiliation) or similar workspace solutions, where the entire workstation is virtualized in a data center and you only access via a thin client. Entire nations of people work like this already.

Cloud gaming will probably be the next frontier in this.

(Real time) cloud gaming only works with a very low latency internet connection, which requires wiring, which leaves out most of the non-city users (and still some city ones).

Not to mention that it's ridiculously wasteful.

What percent of consoles/gaming pcs are being used for gaming in average per hour? 15%?

I'd say it's rather more wasteful for everyone to have expensive rigs to play games a couple of hours a day when we could share computing resources in the cloud

I would love to have this, but this is very naive in the current economic climate. There is already a notion of trying to get rid of general computing devices from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. They would immediately use the opportunity to corner the market, lock down everything, and start extorting more money. There is no way I would give up my personal desktop.

By definition, everyone doesn't have expensive rigs.

But you're right, one shouldn't automatically assume that streaming is more wasteful than letting the resources sit idle... (one issue here is the assumptions about how fast computers are replaced for consumerist reasons ?)

(And this would still leave the issue of the loss of ownership.)

> The latency issue is increasingly disappearing or at least becoming negligible in most population centers

I believe that thats your experience. Its not really because the technology is improving though, its because you're growing older.

The latency is absolutely horrendous, and anyone thats used to a decently performing system will not agree with your opinion.

As a simple example: i can easily code 6+h with no break on a good system, with these mainframe system i'm gonna take a break at least every hour because the fatigue builds up so quickly. Its every little interaction, simple input that doesn't appear for 50+ms, switching owrkspaces thats delayed for 150+ms.

Alternatively, they're young enough that they've never experienced good latency and don't know what they're missing. See:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

My experience is the opposite on this. I have had my first job where Citrix was used for day-to-day tasks in 2023 September, and I would estimate the latency was around 300-400ms. It was very noticeable and frustrating, especially when coding. I would be typing code and I knew I made a typo, but had to wait for the characters to actually show up on the screen, before I knew how many characters to backspace over. Switching windows and workspaces felt sluggish. This was with both the server and the client being in the same country.

It was a bad enough experience, that it is now a part of my interview questions if the company works through remote desktop solutions.

I remember using a variety of VNC/RDP over local network for connecting to my laptop, so I could do development there and keep the codebase completely separate from my other machines, while still using my desktop keyboard, mouse and larger monitor. I'd just turn it on, connect to it and treat it as another window in the OS.

That said, I think we either need proper OS level sandboxing, something like Qubes or just using multiple VMs or devices with remoting. It doesn't feel viable to have something like Discord or other communication software or things with account tokens, and executables like software or games running on the same install, whereas dual booting isn't viable for that either.

> I think this is just another opportunity to create new services.

So maybe cool for people with itches or startup aspirations, more hassle for everyone else.

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