5 ms·

I don't get the use case. Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop? Even a very low-spec laptop is going to run a simple graphical desktop environment

I don't get the use case. Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop? Even a very low-spec laptop is going to run a simple graphical desktop environment like Xfce just fine. Watching a youtube video, browsing the web and even video conferencing can be handled with any new-ish laptop. And in reality, you still want a reliable laptop with decent keyboard, long battery life, good display and so on. So you won't end up on a low spec machine to begin with. For computation heavy dev stuff a simple SSH access is good enough. It can be a very smooth experience with a locally running VS Code or something.

dijonman2 4y ago
Companies with strict data protection policies can force the usage of VDE for sensitive tasks, as part of a broader DLP program.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  My work environment has a set of tasks that need to run exclusively in a tightly controlled cloud desktop environment. It's a nightmare.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Corollary: your company might force to use you a cloud VM desktop _even when your laptop is significantly more performant than the entire server holding these VMs_.
Jorge1o1 4y ago
This isn’t the intended use case, but one upside of cloud desktops is that if I ever forget to bring my work laptop with me, I can RDP from a friend’s computer, etc. In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops you can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of someone else’s money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y billion dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install VSCode or MobaXTerm on your own. IT presumably got tired of being bombarded with application install requests, so one solution is to use vendorized cloud desktops that come with pretty easy tools (for them) to install applications.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  > In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops you can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of someone else’s money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y billion dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install VSCode or MobaXTerm on your own. I feel this so much.
- guhidalg 4y ago
  I don't understand when and why so much power was delegated to IT w.r.t installing software. The FSF needs to start fighting IT and device management policies before talking about open source software.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    It's because people install malware a lot. Usually it comes along for the ride with pirated software, creating a 2x headache. I remember when they introduced similar policies at Google for Windows workstations - the stated rationale was that Windows users would warez literally anything and this was independent of job role or position. Senior engineering managers would be warezing things and it would come bound to malware. So they moved to binary whitelisting, eventually :( Linux avoids this problem mostly because it doesn't have much commercial software to pirate in the first place.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop? I've travelled to and through countries (e.g. in the Gulf, France, India) with my work laptop where I was deeply uncomfortable having those data on hand. Taking a clean machine and remoting into that one when needed removes a lot of paranoia points.
- jhickok 4y ago
  I don't think you need a remote desktop in order to keep the data off the machine.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Yeah, I'd much rather deal with a local desktop and a remote filesystem, for sure.
    - gcatalfamo 4y ago
      I'd like that too, but can you give me a working example that is not based around using a VPN, or editing documents on the browser? (which are both viable, but there is a different number of drawbacks to each)
      - NoGravitas 4y ago
        A remote filesystem over a VPN ought to be reasonable. I can't think of another reasonable way to do it.
        jhickok 4y ago
        Technically any files-over-https might work? I'm thinking Sharepoint, etc.
- cardanome 4y ago
dirtyid 4y ago
PIA to manage multiple systems / os that don't have functional parity. My steamlink, tablet and occasionally phone remote desktops strait onto my desktop with all the customizations I'm used to for daily tasks. It's just nice not having to adjust. Only problem (relatively new) is DRM preventing many streaming service from displaying video.
nefix 4y ago
Disclaimer: I'm part of the IsardVDI project (https://gitlab.com/isard/isardvdi https://gitlab.com/isard/isardvdi) In my opinion, developing is not a really good use case. Some of our team develops using VSCode + SSH against a remote VM. One of the best use cases we've found is education and, specifically, trade schools. There are some trade school courses that require really specific software (image and sound, designing electronics, interacting with proprietary robots, etc.), and it's a painful experience to manage all of that, add new programs, etc. (some trade schools have 60+ courses, each one having different subjects and different software through the year!) By having cloud desktops, the teacher can create a template with their requirements and share that template with the students, and if the requirements change, it's as simple as modifying the template and sharing it again. Also, most of the public schools here are underfunded, so they end up with really old machines, and the cost of renewing a whole classroom gets really high: let's say a new machine costs between 600€ and 1000€ (depending on the trade course requirements). If you have 30 machines for each classroom, it's something around 24k. (Then there are lots of classrooms, you get the idea) By having "cloud" desktops, there's no need for renewing old hardware, since you can have something like xfce + the viewer, and all the systems can easily manage that load (we even have classrooms with RPIs), and this can be a huge money saving In the end, cloud desktops aren't the best option for all the use cases, as the author puts it: > Overall, the most important thing to take into account here is that your users almost certainly have more use cases than you expect, and this sort of change is going to have direct impact on the workflow of every single one of your users. Make sure you know how much that's going to be, and take that into consideration when suggesting it'll save you money.
pjmlp 4y ago
Contractors, no way to take code out premises (assuming proper security settings on the VMs), and easy to get new instances instead of waiting for crap Dell and HP dual core laptops, with 8GB and 256GB HDD.
NibLer 4y ago
I would love a great cloud desktop. No worries about local backup, ability to use older hardware.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
If your definition of zero trust includes the endpoint devices because they are in an area that the general public can access. If you want access to your desktop from multiple locations. Ex, at my local hospital the staff can tap their badge to any computer and instantly reconnect to their desktop exactly where they left off. If you are in a multi-site scenario but your big LOB app hates the internet so you need all your clients to be in the same building as the server. This is actually the reason I deploy vmware horizon... im not sure what jack henry and Fiserv are doing to make their overblown CRUD apps so network heavy and inefficient to operate, but I'm happy they are finally rolling out their own cloud-first apps so they can deal with their own garbage instead of outsourcing their support to their customeres IT guys. If you literally just can't acquire hardware because of a pandemic and need more compute than you have on hand.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  You definition of zero trust can never include the endpoint devices. Those get to see everything you type on them, and have the same level of access to your services that its user has. Instead, with a remote desktop you are only adding a bit more of vulnerabilities. It can never remove any. (About those others, there exist some nice works about program portability, that culminated on fully distributed OSes, but those have no adoption. Instead, people prefer to hack distribution over the piles of hacks that are modern OSes. Obviously, it doesn't work well.)
thesh4d0w 4y ago
When your game developer has and needs a $4k workstation, and they work from home half the week. No reason to buy them another machine and have them maintain two seperate workspaces, we just give them parsec. All our staff seem happy and we don't get complaints. Author hasn't tried modern tools it seems. Another use case: mobile people with laptops, who sometimes want to hop in to a play test or show a game off to a vendor. No need for them to have a gaming laptop 99% of the time, when an X1 carbon + parsec to a beefy box work fine.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I'd like a sync'd work env that does local as well as remote-from-anywhere ability. The fact that Microsoft failed at a dozen sync frameworks (as chat is for google, sync was for Microsoft) and in 2020 this is still not really doable. Also, I still can't find a good guide for spinning up a desktop in AWS.

dijonman2 4y ago

Companies with strict data protection policies can force the usage of VDE for sensitive tasks, as part of a broader DLP program.

Frost1x 4y ago
My work environment has a set of tasks that need to run exclusively in a tightly controlled cloud desktop environment. It's a nightmare.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
Corollary: your company might force to use you a cloud VM desktop _even when your laptop is significantly more performant than the entire server holding these VMs_.

Jorge1o1 4y ago

This isn’t the intended use case, but one upside of cloud desktops is that if I ever forget to bring my work laptop with me, I can RDP from a friend’s computer, etc. In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops you can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of someone else’s money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y billion dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install VSCode or MobaXTerm on your own. IT presumably got tired of being bombarded with application install requests, so one solution is to use vendorized cloud desktops that come with pretty easy tools (for them) to install applications.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
> In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops you can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of someone else’s money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y billion dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install VSCode or MobaXTerm on your own. I feel this so much.
guhidalg 4y ago
I don't understand when and why so much power was delegated to IT w.r.t installing software. The FSF needs to start fighting IT and device management policies before talking about open source software.
- origin_path 4y ago
  It's because people install malware a lot. Usually it comes along for the ride with pirated software, creating a 2x headache. I remember when they introduced similar policies at Google for Windows workstations - the stated rationale was that Windows users would warez literally anything and this was independent of job role or position. Senior engineering managers would be warezing things and it would come bound to malware. So they moved to binary whitelisting, eventually :( Linux avoids this problem mostly because it doesn't have much commercial software to pirate in the first place.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> Why would you even consider using a cloud desktop? I've travelled to and through countries (e.g. in the Gulf, France, India) with my work laptop where I was deeply uncomfortable having those data on hand. Taking a clean machine and remoting into that one when needed removes a lot of paranoia points.

jhickok 4y ago
I don't think you need a remote desktop in order to keep the data off the machine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Yeah, I'd much rather deal with a local desktop and a remote filesystem, for sure.
  - gcatalfamo 4y ago
    I'd like that too, but can you give me a working example that is not based around using a VPN, or editing documents on the browser? (which are both viable, but there is a different number of drawbacks to each)
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      A remote filesystem over a VPN ought to be reasonable. I can't think of another reasonable way to do it.
      - jhickok 4y ago
        Technically any files-over-https might work? I'm thinking Sharepoint, etc.
cardanome 4y ago

dirtyid 4y ago

PIA to manage multiple systems / os that don't have functional parity. My steamlink, tablet and occasionally phone remote desktops strait onto my desktop with all the customizations I'm used to for daily tasks. It's just nice not having to adjust. Only problem (relatively new) is DRM preventing many streaming service from displaying video.

nefix 4y ago

Disclaimer: I'm part of the IsardVDI project (https://gitlab.com/isard/isardvdi https://gitlab.com/isard/isardvdi) In my opinion, developing is not a really good use case. Some of our team develops using VSCode + SSH against a remote VM. One of the best use cases we've found is education and, specifically, trade schools. There are some trade school courses that require really specific software (image and sound, designing electronics, interacting with proprietary robots, etc.), and it's a painful experience to manage all of that, add new programs, etc. (some trade schools have 60+ courses, each one having different subjects and different software through the year!) By having cloud desktops, the teacher can create a template with their requirements and share that template with the students, and if the requirements change, it's as simple as modifying the template and sharing it again. Also, most of the public schools here are underfunded, so they end up with really old machines, and the cost of renewing a whole classroom gets really high: let's say a new machine costs between 600€ and 1000€ (depending on the trade course requirements). If you have 30 machines for each classroom, it's something around 24k. (Then there are lots of classrooms, you get the idea) By having "cloud" desktops, there's no need for renewing old hardware, since you can have something like xfce + the viewer, and all the systems can easily manage that load (we even have classrooms with RPIs), and this can be a huge money saving In the end, cloud desktops aren't the best option for all the use cases, as the author puts it: > Overall, the most important thing to take into account here is that your users almost certainly have more use cases than you expect, and this sort of change is going to have direct impact on the workflow of every single one of your users. Make sure you know how much that's going to be, and take that into consideration when suggesting it'll save you money.

pjmlp 4y ago

Contractors, no way to take code out premises (assuming proper security settings on the VMs), and easy to get new instances instead of waiting for crap Dell and HP dual core laptops, with 8GB and 256GB HDD.

NibLer 4y ago

I would love a great cloud desktop. No worries about local backup, ability to use older hardware.

jabroni_salad 4y ago

If your definition of zero trust includes the endpoint devices because they are in an area that the general public can access. If you want access to your desktop from multiple locations. Ex, at my local hospital the staff can tap their badge to any computer and instantly reconnect to their desktop exactly where they left off. If you are in a multi-site scenario but your big LOB app hates the internet so you need all your clients to be in the same building as the server. This is actually the reason I deploy vmware horizon... im not sure what jack henry and Fiserv are doing to make their overblown CRUD apps so network heavy and inefficient to operate, but I'm happy they are finally rolling out their own cloud-first apps so they can deal with their own garbage instead of outsourcing their support to their customeres IT guys. If you literally just can't acquire hardware because of a pandemic and need more compute than you have on hand.

marcosdumay 4y ago
You definition of zero trust can never include the endpoint devices. Those get to see everything you type on them, and have the same level of access to your services that its user has. Instead, with a remote desktop you are only adding a bit more of vulnerabilities. It can never remove any. (About those others, there exist some nice works about program portability, that culminated on fully distributed OSes, but those have no adoption. Instead, people prefer to hack distribution over the piles of hacks that are modern OSes. Obviously, it doesn't work well.)

thesh4d0w 4y ago

When your game developer has and needs a $4k workstation, and they work from home half the week. No reason to buy them another machine and have them maintain two seperate workspaces, we just give them parsec. All our staff seem happy and we don't get complaints. Author hasn't tried modern tools it seems. Another use case: mobile people with laptops, who sometimes want to hop in to a play test or show a game off to a vendor. No need for them to have a gaming laptop 99% of the time, when an X1 carbon + parsec to a beefy box work fine.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

I'd like a sync'd work env that does local as well as remote-from-anywhere ability. The fact that Microsoft failed at a dozen sync frameworks (as chat is for google, sync was for Microsoft) and in 2020 this is still not really doable. Also, I still can't find a good guide for spinning up a desktop in AWS.