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Abcdesktop – a cloud native desktopless system
- jstanley 4y agoThis looks cool, nice work. I was briefly trying to work on a "cloud desktop" system at one point but found it too much trouble to get it working properly. > Because docker containers are lightweight and run without the extra load of an operating system, you can run many graphical applications on a single kernel. This is an odd thing to say. Can't I already run many graphical applications on a single kernel even without docker containers? And wouldn't that be even more lightweight?
- lhoff 4y ago> This is an odd thing to say. Can't I already run many graphical applications on a single kernel even without docker containers? And wouldn't that be even more lightweight? I think what is written between the lines is that they compare it to full OS virtualization. That need for that results from the desire to isolate multiple users from each other.
- jbverschoor 4y agoOn mobile it says: ABC + docker = Vnc + x1 Docker wraps to the next line. Very confusing
- legalcorrection 4y agoWhat is the performance like? I’ve found that VNC is garbage even in on a fast local network, let alone over the internet. I’ve yet to find something that works anywhere close to as well as Microsoft RDP, which feels like sitting in front of a local machine as long as you don’t try watching HD video or something.
- derekzhouzhen 4y agoA good VNC client should give you responsiveness on par of RDP. VNC tunnel through web socket to a client running in a browser window may push it to the annoying zone though.
- lostapathy 4y agoWhat’s a good vnc client and server that actually pulls this off? I’ve never had any luck with it either. At least not on Ubuntu.
- maicro 4y agoIt's a little specialist, and doesn't have Linux server/host functionality (and IIRC Mac is still in beta), but if you want to remotely connect to a Windows 10+ computer - Parsec works really well. I've used it at work to share access to a beefy desktop for running CAD (SolidWorks) and multimedia (mostly Adobe Premiere Pro/CC) software, without having to be at the computer - we use it from the local network, and from across the country, with fairly satisfying performance.
- derekzhouzhen 4y agoIf it is from linux to linux, I'll use xpra https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
- hedora 4y agoTigerVNC
- koumoula 4y agofrom the abcdesktopio github repository tigervnc this project uses TigerVNC release 1.12.0 it starts the command Xvnc and then websockify python to convert TCP socket as WebSocket
- digitallyfree 4y agoVNC can have good performance over gig LAN using raw encoding. The issues occur when you add compression (hextile, tight, etc.) which does a good job cutting bandwidth but adds a ton of latency, which is the main reason your sessions feels slow. RDP does a great job of keeping the latency down. Note that I have never had a good experience using noVNC (the web-based solution used by this service) even over fast LAN - I think it's because of the additional overhead of the web browser. I personally use SPICE for VDI which performs decently over LAN, but is not as good as RDP over WAN with constrained bandwidth.
- rasengan 4y agoSpice [1] is better than VNC. Shells.com [2] uses this protocol. [1] https://www.spice-space.org/index.html https://www.spice-space.org/index.html [2[ https://shells.com/ https://shells.com/
- FpUser 4y agoNomachine works fine for me even on relatively crappy connection.
- hoppyhoppy2 4y agoLooks cool. FYI, the "demo" link appears to be returning 404 Not Found
- LoveMortuus 4y agoThe correct link is https://demo.abcdesktop.io/ https://demo.abcdesktop.io/ The way it's written, but it seems that the hyperlink that's bound to the written link is different (https://www.abcdesktop.io/demo https://www.abcdesktop.io/demo).
- ninju 4y agoThe 'bad' URL is only the first hyperlink (at the beginning of the 'Quick online preview' paragraph). The 2nd time the URL is shown (in the small paragraph) the hyperlink is correct
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 4y agoNot sure how the timing works, but that might be an unfortunate choice of name. Or maybe there's no real audience overlap, so it's ok.
- glmdev 4y agoThis seems like a cool concept, but I didn't try it out because the demo requires FULL READ-WRITE access to my GitHub account, its organizations, and private details! Surely reading basic user info would suffice.
- mrlinx 4y agoSame.
- alsetmusic 4y agoI paused for the same reason. I logged in using my Gmail. I assume a sizable number of people here have a throwaway Gmail. It didn’t need access to anything in the mailbox like with GitHub. Neat project. Cool for a proof of concept, but not solving any needs I have.
- Gorgo 4y agoSame here, I'm thinking about installing it to try it out but I'm not going to give them full access to my profile.
- jefurii 4y agoNope. Hard pass.
- koumoula 4y agoThe demo.abcdesktop.io OAuth configuration has changed. The demo doesn’t require FULL READ-WRITE access to GitHub account, anymore. It uses only Personal user data Profile information (read-only), just to display your user name in the top bar. The scope OAuth 2.0 has changed from ‘user’ to 'read:user' You can use a GitHub OAuth safely, it was a misunderstanding in GitHub doc OAuth
- hda111 4y agoGood point. Since the Travis incident I don’t give any app write access to anything.
- jitl 4y agoIs this using Guacamole for its VNC client? In college [2012] I ran Guacamole on my home server for RDP remoting into my desktop PC from a Chromebook, and the performance was excellent. Curious to see what the experience is like with more newfangled Cloud Native stuff.
- tyingq 4y ago"abcdesktop.io = NoVNC + X11 + Docker" It's using NoVNC.
- ta988 4y agoGuacamole is impressive I agree.
- paulgb 4y agoWebtop is attempting something similar to this using Guacamole rather than NoVNC. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/webtop https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/webtop I know very little about how the two compare.
- deknos 4y agoWhat's the advantage as with guacamole and/or spice?
- ALittleLight 4y agoThere are two instances of the string "deskop" in the first paragraph that should probably be "desktop".
- koumoula 4y agoThank you for this issue, the "deskop" means "desktop" and have been fixed.
- pmontra 4y agoIs there any technical reason for not making it work with user / authentication when people download, configure and run their own instances?
- koumoula 4y agoYes, it is for security reason on demo.abcdesktop.io instance. abcdesktop.io supports LDAP, LDAPS, Active Directory services, and Basic, NTLM and Kerberos authentication.
- TuringTest 4y agoWhy do I keep getting this distinct impression that people use containers to keep reinventing OS processes, but "in the cloud!"? Next thing, you'll see announced a platform for reusable container services that can be dynamically linked from other containers - to avoid including them multiple times in your application containers that share the same version, and we'll have come full circle. Is there a subtle detail about packaging software for distribution as isolated executables that I'm missing?
- rkeene2 4y agoIt's the same reason people keep inventing VMs. Every process is also a VM (and can only do what the hypervisor... kernel... allows), but it's a more convenient abstraction to run a new kernel and its processes in a hardware emulating VM within that VM for many kinds of workloads, despite the overhead of emulating hardware. Containers are a middle-ground, and a useful abstraction -- where you can have a group of processes that can share some resources and be accounted for together, but without the need to emulate hardware or a second hypervisor (kernel). For lots of workloads, though, processes would be enough. Some more could be done with additional work to kernels to help group processes together (Linux cgroups, Solaris contracts and zone facilities) and more container-aware schedulers (Not sure what Linux has, Solaris has a 2-layer scheduler for its containers). I was heavily into containers in the 90s and 2000s, and then VMs when they became more viable with Xen 2, but I've been moving things back to just processes.
- liotier 4y agoAnd then, one day, single-system-image will be back in fashion and processes will migrate across the cluster - like in the good old days of Openmosix, but maybe with Kubernetes-like robustness...
- brimble 4y agoNo, you're basically right. To the extent that containers solve a problem, it's mostly a problem with package management, and with UI for process isolation/permissions/hardening.
- 4y ago
- antx 4y agostop encouraging users to pipe curl to the shell, darn it.
- syncbehind 4y agoIs that bad?
- 10000truths 4y agoNo worse than downloading a pre-built binary off the internet and running it.
- chunk_waffle 4y agoIf you follow that to it's logical conclusion then "everything is terrible and nothing is secure" (which is probably the reality) My personal gripe with piping curl output to sh is about expectations. If I have some binary I'm running, I have _some_ expectations about what it will do, same for a Makefile, and RPM, etc. None of those things are guaranteed to do what they're supposed to but I have some idea what _should_ happen. Unless I read through the script, I have less expectations about what the script is going to do. It says it will install my program but is it going to pull in dependencies from my package manager? Download and compile something, shove binaries in my $PATH, edit dot files in $HOME?
- gowld 4y agoMakefile, RPM , and shell all essentially do the same thing and have the same power to violate your system.
- chunk_waffle 4y agoTo re-iterate, for me its not really about the potential for abuse, its more about expectations. You can abuse anything (though I'd also argue that signed packages from companies like RedHat and Canonical are usually up to a higher standard than the random Shell script plucked from the internet.) If someone places a shoe box on your doorstep you might expect shoes to be inside. Of course, there's a non zero chance its full of bees. But shoes are a reasonable guess. If someone places a cardboard box on your doorstep with no writing on it whatsoever, there's no expectation about whats in the box. (Unless you hear the bees buzzing from a distance.)
- altano 4y agoLooks neat. Seems to have a lot of overlap with Kasm Workspaces (https://www.kasmweb.com/ https://www.kasmweb.com/) which is another cool project.
- kkfx 4y agoSince to be usable we need a modern WebVM, improperly named browser for legacy reasons, so we need a desktop merely used as a bootloader for thw WebVM what's the point of having a remote tools, witch means someone else computer (or at least another computer) + a desktop + the dependency on the network just to work? Honestly I think it's about time to tell management that's nothing costly nor complicated in maintain desktops with custom deploys not just the default install by some vendor, and in supporting them instead of investing in servers with much more resources just to centralize for the point of merely centralize... Sorry for being rude, I've used Apache Guacamole time ago and I still ask me why it was even though in the first place...
- status200 4y agoI got a 404 when attempting to view the demo, as the link says one URL but actually sends my browser to https://www.abcdesktop.io/demo https://www.abcdesktop.io/demo (instead of the demo subdomain)... not the most inspiring first impression, I must admit.
- hawski 4y agoFor a cloud native desktopless system I was thinking it should not be remote desktop based. Is there a cloud desktop, that is a bit more like NeWS? I mean text rendering client side as HTML/CSS, image and video view via img/video tags. A sprinkle of JS to make it smooth and dynamic. With normal windows and maybe even a taskbar would be splendid. Possible X or Wayland integration, but as separate windows in such a system. Is there something like this?
- tehlike 4y agohttps://os-js.org/ https://os-js.org/ https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/
- hawski 4y agoThanks. That is not exactly what I had in mind as far as I understand what those projects do. It seems that they run entirely in the browser. Server just serves HTML/CSS/JS. I was thinking about a desktop that would be rendered on the browser, but applications would run actually on the remote server. So if you would log in from a different computer you would have exact same desktop opened. A bit like X with this difference, that the text rendering would be done straight on the browser without canvas. But that's a good entry point.
- starkruzr 4y agois... anyone able to get to this thing? has it been Slashdotted?
- zafiro17 4y agoI applaud the work that went into this, but unless I'm missing something, they've recreated a terminal server, where nomachine has delivered desktops for ages and works over a connection as poor as dial-up.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chunsj 4y agoRunning a web browser already requires a substantial desktop system.
- warrenm 4y agoor a lightweight tablet or old laptop/desktop or maybe even a phone