3 ms·

thin clients have been attempted numerous times in history (remember the Sun ones?), but as far as I know none really succeeded?

by aliswe 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago
They're succeeding pretty well in places that do VDI. The thing is, VDI has not really been mainstream. I've seen it in high-reliability (or high-flexibility) places like callcenters and medical facilities and high-security places like police. My current employer still uses them in some callcenters. Now that cloud VDI is easy to buy, it could become a true alternative for small businesses if a cheap thin client is available. Sure, they won't work without internet access but really, pretty much all work requires internet now. Right now Dell's Wyse clients start at $700 which is a bit silly for a thin client. At that price you might as well go for a full PC. But I could see Microsoft offering them for $200 or so with an Azure Virtual Desktop contract for a couple years, and this really taking off. The Sun Rays were really niche yes, but so was Sun itself. It was a niche within a niche. And I've seen places that had those. I still have a couple Sun Ray 2's here at home in fact :)
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  VDI is still laggy crap from the user perspective that regularly adds +50ms or +100ms or whatever to everything you do on a computer and it's worse if you're using mobile internet in particular. VDI may gets CIOs and CFOs excited but it fails to actually impress the people using the computers. You can also lease physical hardware to get into a similar financial situation to a thin client + desktop situation. The only real interest that virtual desktops are being pushed as a concept is that it makes giant dollar signs light up in Nadella's eyes, but even he has to be wary of pushing his customers into the clutches of MacOS and ChromeOS and Linux. You know what else happened the last few years? People started working from home, where a certain amount of downtime every month over a non-redundant internet connection is a matter of course. If anything VDI seemed more practical a few years ago when you could expect people to be in urban offices with redundant connections nearby some Microsoft datacentre. I've seen "thin clients" called Amazon Alexas and Google Homes enter peoples home and having to phone home to the cloud is CRAP, you want to be able to use local processing as much as possible and failover to local processing as much as possible. While most things you want to do may require an internet connection, it turns out there's a whole lot of things you can do and want to do that really don't when the internet is down. Sure VDI has its niches, like in security sensitive places where you want to keep data centralized on some servers, or in workplaces where maybe highly performant computers aren't a priority, but as somebody who LIKES computers the technology is an overcomplicated mess that is as fast as molasses when it's competing with iPadOS and Tab S7+ pushing latency down to a blistering 9ms. eSports gamers are busy replacing their glacially slow 240hz monitors with 390hz monitors. Every peripheral company is now selling low-latency wireless equipment that's as fast as wired. Apple Silicon improved QoS and used its efficiency cores to help keep its performance cores idle and ready to respond to user inputs as quickly as possible. Then you see Nadella going "you know what's a great idea? Phoning out to a datacentre and having a high-latency hardware running high-latency software do your processing whenever you double click anything".
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    True about the working from home, but in my job at least I have a major problem if my internet is down. I basically have to pack up and work somewhere else or take time off or whatever. However I actually don't because I got my own 4G backup :) During the first lockdown I worked off it for 2 weeks! Because my provider was also very difficult about sending an engineer out.. I don't work on a VDI myself, but the users tell me (privately) it works fine for them. We do have servers in the same building though (in fact on the same floor as the callcenter). But yeah I could imagine Azure Virtual Desktop has more latency issues due to being cloud based. I agree on the call home privacy issues also, but I'm not envisioning this for personal use. I want to run all my stuff locally too, but my work has totally embraced office 365 so all their stuff is with Microsoft anyway. Which means Microsoft owns it because M365 does not do any kind of end 2 end encryption (unless you pay them a fortune for AIP). And all my work systems are on an isolated VLAN at home. One thing that a cloud service can provide is high peak performance. Of course it needs to be dimensioned for good performance and this is also a major pitfall with local VDI solutions. Often a server is dimensioned pretty much OK for the initial load, but then more and more users are added and management is reluctant to invest more in the servers... Luckily we were able to avoid that pitfall at work. We have 32GB of dedicated RAM per user in fact, and I believe 1 Xeon core. By the way I never really understood the benefit of > 120Hz monitors.. I prefer having lots of pixels (currently 4K @ 24") for sharpness but the smoothness doesn't really bother me. But it's a matter of preference of course.
    - faeriechangling 5y ago
      Well the benefit is most obvious for a competitive video gamer. Lets say they're having a sniper battle in a video game, the first to click will kill the other player. Somebody with a 60hz monitor might have to wait 17ms for the enemies image to render on screen so they can react. Somebody with a 240hz monitor might only have to wait 4ms. When reaction times in a competitive game are around 150 to 200ms that's a pretty large swing. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA This article is also interesting: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/. Beyond that, I think latency has a significant performance impact on many human tasks, I know that humans in videoconferencing can detect extremely small differences in latency. Higher refresh rate I think outside of latency benefits does allow some things to be more easily perceived like text in motion which normally blurs.

thin clients have been attempted numerous times in history (remember the Sun ones?), but as far as I know none really succeeded?

by aliswe 5y ago

thin clients have been attempted numerous times in history (remember the Sun ones?), but as far as I know none really succeeded?

GekkePrutser 5y ago

They're succeeding pretty well in places that do VDI. The thing is, VDI has not really been mainstream. I've seen it in high-reliability (or high-flexibility) places like callcenters and medical facilities and high-security places like police. My current employer still uses them in some callcenters. Now that cloud VDI is easy to buy, it could become a true alternative for small businesses if a cheap thin client is available. Sure, they won't work without internet access but really, pretty much all work requires internet now. Right now Dell's Wyse clients start at $700 which is a bit silly for a thin client. At that price you might as well go for a full PC. But I could see Microsoft offering them for $200 or so with an Azure Virtual Desktop contract for a couple years, and this really taking off. The Sun Rays were really niche yes, but so was Sun itself. It was a niche within a niche. And I've seen places that had those. I still have a couple Sun Ray 2's here at home in fact :)

faeriechangling 5y ago
VDI is still laggy crap from the user perspective that regularly adds +50ms or +100ms or whatever to everything you do on a computer and it's worse if you're using mobile internet in particular. VDI may gets CIOs and CFOs excited but it fails to actually impress the people using the computers. You can also lease physical hardware to get into a similar financial situation to a thin client + desktop situation. The only real interest that virtual desktops are being pushed as a concept is that it makes giant dollar signs light up in Nadella's eyes, but even he has to be wary of pushing his customers into the clutches of MacOS and ChromeOS and Linux. You know what else happened the last few years? People started working from home, where a certain amount of downtime every month over a non-redundant internet connection is a matter of course. If anything VDI seemed more practical a few years ago when you could expect people to be in urban offices with redundant connections nearby some Microsoft datacentre. I've seen "thin clients" called Amazon Alexas and Google Homes enter peoples home and having to phone home to the cloud is CRAP, you want to be able to use local processing as much as possible and failover to local processing as much as possible. While most things you want to do may require an internet connection, it turns out there's a whole lot of things you can do and want to do that really don't when the internet is down. Sure VDI has its niches, like in security sensitive places where you want to keep data centralized on some servers, or in workplaces where maybe highly performant computers aren't a priority, but as somebody who LIKES computers the technology is an overcomplicated mess that is as fast as molasses when it's competing with iPadOS and Tab S7+ pushing latency down to a blistering 9ms. eSports gamers are busy replacing their glacially slow 240hz monitors with 390hz monitors. Every peripheral company is now selling low-latency wireless equipment that's as fast as wired. Apple Silicon improved QoS and used its efficiency cores to help keep its performance cores idle and ready to respond to user inputs as quickly as possible. Then you see Nadella going "you know what's a great idea? Phoning out to a datacentre and having a high-latency hardware running high-latency software do your processing whenever you double click anything".
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  True about the working from home, but in my job at least I have a major problem if my internet is down. I basically have to pack up and work somewhere else or take time off or whatever. However I actually don't because I got my own 4G backup :) During the first lockdown I worked off it for 2 weeks! Because my provider was also very difficult about sending an engineer out.. I don't work on a VDI myself, but the users tell me (privately) it works fine for them. We do have servers in the same building though (in fact on the same floor as the callcenter). But yeah I could imagine Azure Virtual Desktop has more latency issues due to being cloud based. I agree on the call home privacy issues also, but I'm not envisioning this for personal use. I want to run all my stuff locally too, but my work has totally embraced office 365 so all their stuff is with Microsoft anyway. Which means Microsoft owns it because M365 does not do any kind of end 2 end encryption (unless you pay them a fortune for AIP). And all my work systems are on an isolated VLAN at home. One thing that a cloud service can provide is high peak performance. Of course it needs to be dimensioned for good performance and this is also a major pitfall with local VDI solutions. Often a server is dimensioned pretty much OK for the initial load, but then more and more users are added and management is reluctant to invest more in the servers... Luckily we were able to avoid that pitfall at work. We have 32GB of dedicated RAM per user in fact, and I believe 1 Xeon core. By the way I never really understood the benefit of > 120Hz monitors.. I prefer having lots of pixels (currently 4K @ 24") for sharpness but the smoothness doesn't really bother me. But it's a matter of preference of course.
  - faeriechangling 5y ago
    Well the benefit is most obvious for a competitive video gamer. Lets say they're having a sniper battle in a video game, the first to click will kill the other player. Somebody with a 60hz monitor might have to wait 17ms for the enemies image to render on screen so they can react. Somebody with a 240hz monitor might only have to wait 4ms. When reaction times in a competitive game are around 150 to 200ms that's a pretty large swing. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA This article is also interesting: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/. Beyond that, I think latency has a significant performance impact on many human tasks, I know that humans in videoconferencing can detect extremely small differences in latency. Higher refresh rate I think outside of latency benefits does allow some things to be more easily perceived like text in motion which normally blurs.