3 ms·
Who uses a physical workstation anymore? (Besides artists.) OP is suggesting a complete remote desktop for Office applications, like Video Conferencing. Ironic
by sbf501 4y ago
Who uses a physical workstation anymore? (Besides artists.)
OP is suggesting a complete remote desktop for Office applications, like Video Conferencing. Ironically, for all the crap X takes, it could actually pull this off. Moreso for Wayland. I'm surprised there isn't a graphics client/server model out there as good as X after ~40 years. But I think the problem is too much layering: trying to put a VM in the cloud as an office desktop requires way too much bandwidth & latency through a remote desktop without a client/server graphics mode. The tools are there, they just aren't being used because they are missing a security layer.
I haven't used a physical workstation at my desk since 1999, and I was a designer/architect at Intel for decades. Everything was done via VNC. Back then it was called "distributed computing" with AFS, so it was a "proto-cloud". And before that I used a sun workstation to telnet into beefier computers. This was AIX/SunOS/LInux based.
Granted, I was not videoconferencing, but there's no reason why the desktop needs to be rendered in the VM (including the video stream!!!), then encoded, then decoded, then rendered again. It's just dumb.
- leoh 4y agoX for wire protocol is truly awful compared to chrome Remote Desktop. I’ve been eager to use it and have played with all manner of settings, but it’s very slow pretty much no matter what. Apparently it sends many more frame updates — ie is very network and compute heavy compared to other modern protocols that send rolling images.
- politelemon 4y agoA lot of people use workstations. As described in the article, they are more powerful and many people need that power. You may have a specific, limited set of anecdotal data that you're using to ask that question rhetorically probably?
- sbf501 4y agoYep. All I have is have anecdotal data. I believe desktops are on their way out. The trend has been happening for ~30 years. Even Android is working on virtual phone OS. The only applications I've encountered that need a workstation are: Audio Engineering, Video Editing, and 3D mock-up (prior to sending to render farms). All arts. What are some other examples? Everything I know about science and engineering (academic and commercial) uses a cloud/farm/distributed.
- mattnewport 4y agoGame and VR development generally need powerful desktops both for programmers and content creators. Our entire team of (fully remote) VR developers have high end gaming desktops. If cloud workstations worked well they'd be interesting for us but none of them really support VR development at the moment.