4 ms·

I have a friend who works at a big Corporation (100k employees) where everyone has a thin dumb client and windows desktop running on a server. It works great, e

by rb808 7y ago

I have a friend who works at a big Corporation (100k employees) where everyone has a thin dumb client and windows desktop running on a server. It works great, except video stutters if not small sized. Way of the future? Its an efficient way to pool resources, and prevents people physically stealing data.

chooseaname 7y ago
> Way of the future? Why not? Everything old becomes new again at some point.
- ape4 7y ago
  Like X Window
  - beamatronic 7y ago
    The first time I ran a program on a remote computer, and used its UI over the Internet, was 1992. In fact that’s how I discovered Mosaic. Running random executables in the bin directory of lab machines.
jm4 7y ago
Been running a setup like that for over 6 years. It’s great. Support is ridiculously easy. Desktop refreshes aren’t bad either and that’s one of the most difficult projects for an IT department to pull off. We’ve done a couple of them now - once to add RAM, disk and CPU and another to change the desktop image. Deployments and big jobs like opening new offices or big moves are simple. The video is easy to fix with a fast network or Apex PCOIP accelerator cards, although those are being replaced by expensive server-side GPU’s these days. We have some google earth users and a few others with gpu tasks. A couple Apex cards in a couple of the servers took care of that. The only thing that completely sucks is USB storage devices. They are painfully slow. Most people accept it because they are rarely used in our environment and everything else is faster than any other system they’ve had.
- hobs 7y ago
  Printing with terminal services still kind of sucks and for large print jobs there's still third party print services, but otherwise I'd agree.
  - jm4 7y ago
    It’s not terminal services. We are using VMware horizon. Printing is fine. USB scanning is a little slow but most people don’t seem to notice.
wzdd 7y ago
I worked for a while at a company which did this and, while it worked, everything was slightly worse (for me as a programmer -- I'm sure support was much easier). Noticeable latency while doing normal things like scrolling through code or switching windows. Every so often there would be a latency spike which, because it happened infrequently but unpredictably, was surprisingly disconcerting. I ended up having to retrain myself to use "low bandwidth" actions, like pgup/pgdn rather than using a scrollwheel. I don't think it significantly impacted my performance, but I often found myself wishing I had a local desktop.
pjmlp 7y ago
Actually spirit of the past, aka timeshare mainframes.
cameronh90 7y ago
Has problems when your staff spend a lot of time mobile though. Our staff have laptops and are quite often travelling on trains, aeroplanes, in offices and hotels where their guest WiFi is borked. While the laptops have a 4G chip, and connectivity is improving year by year, it is still not feasible to rely on remote desktop only for our use case. Local desktop and offline file sync is still the only way to go here.

by rb808 7y ago

chooseaname 7y ago

> Way of the future? Why not? Everything old becomes new again at some point.

ape4 7y ago
Like X Window
- beamatronic 7y ago
  The first time I ran a program on a remote computer, and used its UI over the Internet, was 1992. In fact that’s how I discovered Mosaic. Running random executables in the bin directory of lab machines.

jm4 7y ago

Been running a setup like that for over 6 years. It’s great. Support is ridiculously easy. Desktop refreshes aren’t bad either and that’s one of the most difficult projects for an IT department to pull off. We’ve done a couple of them now - once to add RAM, disk and CPU and another to change the desktop image. Deployments and big jobs like opening new offices or big moves are simple. The video is easy to fix with a fast network or Apex PCOIP accelerator cards, although those are being replaced by expensive server-side GPU’s these days. We have some google earth users and a few others with gpu tasks. A couple Apex cards in a couple of the servers took care of that. The only thing that completely sucks is USB storage devices. They are painfully slow. Most people accept it because they are rarely used in our environment and everything else is faster than any other system they’ve had.

hobs 7y ago
Printing with terminal services still kind of sucks and for large print jobs there's still third party print services, but otherwise I'd agree.
- jm4 7y ago
  It’s not terminal services. We are using VMware horizon. Printing is fine. USB scanning is a little slow but most people don’t seem to notice.

wzdd 7y ago

I worked for a while at a company which did this and, while it worked, everything was slightly worse (for me as a programmer -- I'm sure support was much easier). Noticeable latency while doing normal things like scrolling through code or switching windows. Every so often there would be a latency spike which, because it happened infrequently but unpredictably, was surprisingly disconcerting. I ended up having to retrain myself to use "low bandwidth" actions, like pgup/pgdn rather than using a scrollwheel. I don't think it significantly impacted my performance, but I often found myself wishing I had a local desktop.

pjmlp 7y ago

Actually spirit of the past, aka timeshare mainframes.

cameronh90 7y ago

Has problems when your staff spend a lot of time mobile though. Our staff have laptops and are quite often travelling on trains, aeroplanes, in offices and hotels where their guest WiFi is borked. While the laptops have a 4G chip, and connectivity is improving year by year, it is still not feasible to rely on remote desktop only for our use case. Local desktop and offline file sync is still the only way to go here.