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Comment by dn2k | Hacker News Reader

"WorkSpaces provide users with the Windows 7 Experience"

I don't really want to have a Windows 7 Experience.. wonder why they don't provide a linux desktop.

I agree...I'd like a Linux desktop as well. However, what client software on the Linux side performs as well as RDP? How can I get that same performance?

VNC certainly doesn't do it. NX is about as close as I've come, and it can still be laggy at times. I think Spice may be the future on this side, but not sure.

For those of you who run remote Linux desktops in the cloud and actually use a UI, how do you do it and get an adequate desktop experience (sound, video, etc)?

You can actually use RDP for Linux. Most of what I do is server stuff, so this really hasn't been a concern of mine, but recently I was playing with the custom cryptocurrency mining distro, BAMT. You connect to it via RDP client (in this case, I used Microsoft's OSX client). I can't say anything about performance relative to VNC/NX, however.

You can do that easily yourself with EC2. Windows requires a little more hand-holding on their part on AWS.

Licensing, Licensing, Licensing.

Feel free to imagine Ballmer running around a stage yelling this.

To be fair, they're not really jazzing up how great of an experience Windows 7 is, but rather referring to enabling the Desktop Experience feature[1] of Windows Server 2008 that installs/enables standard desktop features and allow it to be used akin to an end-user desktop.

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772567.aspx

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