Hacker News Reader

Comment by RomanPushkin | Hacker News Reader

There are many. For example, you're leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there. The same for remote desktops.

Another use case if when you have a long-running meeting, and still need to share. I found I sometimes just do not sit and listen for those 1-2 hours meetings, but prefer to code.

And for those of us who just don't like audio, like myself. I have many students who I am willing to help, but I don't wanna get audio-involved. My voice chat is not a very parallelable resource.

View on HN

> leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there

What could be going on when you're not home?

If this is meant as a security tool, the fact you have to look at it is a non-starter.

If this is meant as anything else, why wouldn't you use VNC?

VNC doesn't even share your screen, it creates its own offscreen screen and doesn't even load your desktop, and uses some unusable minimalist window manager with a stupid X cursor. Yeah I could probably figure out how to get it to work but it's a chore. Terrible product design.

I've been wanting to create something WebRTC based, I'm not happy with either VNC or RDP.

On Windows, you do share the screen. I haven't seen any VNC servers that give you a new session like Terminal Services would.

On Linux, I've used both kinds of VNC server. One does start a new X instance, while the other one shares your main X instance. At the time I tried it, it was "TightVNCServer" to get a new X instance, and "X11vnc" to share the existing session.

TigerVNC x0vncserver[0] is just one option for ezpz sharing your existing X session.

Couple it with novnc if you want it in the web browser. Currently WebSockets but WebCodecs support looks to be around the corner[1].

> Terrible product design.

Which "product" are you even talking about here? VNC is a protocol with several different implementations.

[0]: https://tigervnc.org/doc/x0vncserver.html

[1]: https://github.com/novnc/noVNC/pull/1876

Monitoring a remote machine makes a lot of sense. I'm still not totally getting how it can work for live collaboration, but if it works for you that's great. I do love the minimalist efficiency.

I don't think it's meant for live collaboration. Given that the OP is pretty focused on overcoming time restrictions, all-day remote machine monitoring seems like exactly the kind of use case they had in mind.

What’s the 30FPS cursor tracking for, then?

> There are many. For example, you're leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there

On what, your primary desktop?

Maybe you are just a bit Windows-centric but I would guess many of us run virtual desktops and/or other means of remote access such as ssh.

For general monitoring, maybe have a look at state of the art solutions, like https://prometheus.io/

I think adding audio would open interesting use cases though. People hate video, but 1fps isn't video. Audio still feels like an compelling feature. IMO..

>For example, you're leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there.

Doesn't this require leaving the computer unlocked?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com