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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

At work I asked for a remote server and my pc is just a terminal to use ssh & xwindows.

I also considered this, but I was not able to solve the security problems. That remote server must (or not?) hold all my SSH keys, AWS creds, and other stuff, to even be useful. Secops guys would kill me for this. Until then, WSL is good enough.

I know "secops" guys tend to not really understand what's going on, but you can sell it as just a different computer. You could compromise and install whatever handbrake^w security product they like. Bonus points for that computer being separate from the one where you usually browse the interwebs and such.

However, in practice, at least for the kind of compiling I do, AWS EC2 VMs tend not to be faster than my cheap HP Elitebook. Maybe if you can leverage a hefty number of cores, the situation is different. For regular email pushing, the laptop is good enough.

Our secops guys broke most of our laptops so the engineering teams can't use them for development. They told them to use a Hyper-V VM. So they do. With a Hyper-V vswitch that talks directly to the ethernet adapter rather than the VPN connection. So effectively their policy leads to all those SSH keys, AWS credentials and other stuff to be stored on a virtual machine which is connected directly to the public internet and bypasses all DLP and security controls.

The more I work with secops people the more I fail to trust or respect them.

We have a home drive mounted on nfs which is secure.

I have something like that at work for testing Windows things, since my work machine is a Mac.

It's pretty miserable in terms of latency and window management. If you can get this to work well with NX or X forwarding, that's cool, but it's a second class offering when that's your only option.

Hm, are you using native Windows RDP? That one has pretty low latency even in the default configuration (assuming a capable client).

For me using Microsoft's RDP client to a Windows machine a few states over is rather frustrating; using a slower machine locally was much better.

Windows RDP used to be great, but now they figured they'd put animations and transparencies all over the place, so it's become very frustrating to use. Even over a local Gigabit network.

You can turn off effects to restore amazing performance (I know on the Mac version it’s the “optimize for retina displays” option).

I'm talking about effects on the server side. Launching edge for the first time is a major pain, for example.

Edge has a ton of visual noise by default. For me, it's pretty disorienting.

I watched a colleague use VSCode earlier today and was kinda shocked at the amount of pop-ups, and also how they'd cover the active pane, including what the developer was typing.

My attention system isn't built for modern Microsoft apps, I think.

Yes, I'm using Microsoft's RDP client (which on Mac is now called "The Windows App") to connect to an Azure Virtual Desktop.

My home internet connection pretty low latency (wired) and pretty high throughput (gigabit).

It's not absolute torture using the AVD, but it's definitely clunky.

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