5 ms·

Could be worse. I've been doing dev on a citrix desktop, where a single keypress can take seconds to register.

by cjonas 5y ago

rubatuga 5y ago
Fuck Citrix, fuck RDP
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Dude, RDP is amazing. I'll take it any day over the typical *nix alternatives.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  RDP is insanely optimized and there a lot of hard science and math involved in making it work efficiently and effectively for dynamically changing content from steaming media to editing in a terminal and everything in between. However, the technology is constantly updating - if your experience is only with RDP from the days of XP, I can understand your frustration. Also, most third party (non-MSFT) products (servers or clients) don’t implement the full spec and stick to the bare-bones, high-latency, low-throughput v1 protocol which is still RDP thanks to MS dedication to backwards compatibility, and that will absolutely give you a subpar experience as well.
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> I've been doing dev on a citrix desktop, where a single keypress can take seconds to register. Why would that be slow, though? Citrix would only be like that if you were over a high-latency network connection - that's unavoidable. If it is a LAN connection then the Citrix box is overloaded: add more RAM and processor cores (and disable the page-file: disk IO is a big killer of VDI UX). The problem with the Electron apps mentioned is that it's a reflection of the sad state of affairs that we have crappy UX caused by bad technical decision-making, rather than a crappy UX just because the hardware is underprovisoned.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Yeah, it's natural that remote desktop is bad in bad connection even if Citrix is well made. But it can be said that adopting VDI over Citrix solution for developer machine is a mistake, something like adopting Electron.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > But it can be said that adopting VDI over Citrix solution for developer machine is a mistake That's debatable - certainly in many cases it makes a lot of sense: e.g. a corporate environment with hot-desking (i.e. Windows Roaming Profiles), but programmer/dev users need a consistent workspace so they can't use roaming profiles, instead having consistent and persisted VDI environment makes sense. Another reason is that you can pre-image and snapshot an entire OS environment more easily (and even more easily if you're using a Hyper-V VDI instead of a multi-user Terminal Services or Citrix VDI) which is great for ensuring everyone on a team has the exact same build/dev/test environment. This is being reinvented as "Code Spaces" which GitHub and Visual Studio seem to be really getting behind: https://github.com/features/codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces and https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-moved-codespaces/ https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move... ----- But I'd wager that most devlop-in-Citrix/TermServ situations are in "normal" corporate businesses with "no fun allowed" IT policies, and even if they don't have a hot-desk office policy they probably still don't like the idea of anyone having root/admin access to their own machines. (I'm fortunate to have never been in that situation in my working life, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from friends who did short-term contract dev work on-site for companies like Tesco and the like)
- orloffm 5y ago
  Because Windows 10 remotes as bitmaps, not as GDI commands, and also because you need a 3D accelerator card for rendering to be fast.
  - varjag 5y ago
    It ain't that. With modern CPU clock speeds bitblt can be blazing fast without any accelerations.

Could be worse. I've been doing dev on a citrix desktop, where a single keypress can take seconds to register.

by cjonas 5y ago

Could be worse. I've been doing dev on a citrix desktop, where a single keypress can take seconds to register.

rubatuga 5y ago

Fuck Citrix, fuck RDP

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Dude, RDP is amazing. I'll take it any day over the typical *nix alternatives.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
RDP is insanely optimized and there a lot of hard science and math involved in making it work efficiently and effectively for dynamically changing content from steaming media to editing in a terminal and everything in between. However, the technology is constantly updating - if your experience is only with RDP from the days of XP, I can understand your frustration. Also, most third party (non-MSFT) products (servers or clients) don’t implement the full spec and stick to the bare-bones, high-latency, low-throughput v1 protocol which is still RDP thanks to MS dedication to backwards compatibility, and that will absolutely give you a subpar experience as well.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago

> I've been doing dev on a citrix desktop, where a single keypress can take seconds to register. Why would that be slow, though? Citrix would only be like that if you were over a high-latency network connection - that's unavoidable. If it is a LAN connection then the Citrix box is overloaded: add more RAM and processor cores (and disable the page-file: disk IO is a big killer of VDI UX). The problem with the Electron apps mentioned is that it's a reflection of the sad state of affairs that we have crappy UX caused by bad technical decision-making, rather than a crappy UX just because the hardware is underprovisoned.

fomine3 5y ago
Yeah, it's natural that remote desktop is bad in bad connection even if Citrix is well made. But it can be said that adopting VDI over Citrix solution for developer machine is a mistake, something like adopting Electron.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > But it can be said that adopting VDI over Citrix solution for developer machine is a mistake That's debatable - certainly in many cases it makes a lot of sense: e.g. a corporate environment with hot-desking (i.e. Windows Roaming Profiles), but programmer/dev users need a consistent workspace so they can't use roaming profiles, instead having consistent and persisted VDI environment makes sense. Another reason is that you can pre-image and snapshot an entire OS environment more easily (and even more easily if you're using a Hyper-V VDI instead of a multi-user Terminal Services or Citrix VDI) which is great for ensuring everyone on a team has the exact same build/dev/test environment. This is being reinvented as "Code Spaces" which GitHub and Visual Studio seem to be really getting behind: https://github.com/features/codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces and https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-moved-codespaces/ https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move... ----- But I'd wager that most devlop-in-Citrix/TermServ situations are in "normal" corporate businesses with "no fun allowed" IT policies, and even if they don't have a hot-desk office policy they probably still don't like the idea of anyone having root/admin access to their own machines. (I'm fortunate to have never been in that situation in my working life, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from friends who did short-term contract dev work on-site for companies like Tesco and the like)
orloffm 5y ago
Because Windows 10 remotes as bitmaps, not as GDI commands, and also because you need a 3D accelerator card for rendering to be fast.
- varjag 5y ago
  It ain't that. With modern CPU clock speeds bitblt can be blazing fast without any accelerations.