It's about two things: 1) latency, 2) cost. For the latency: 100ms is where the threshold is. Above 100ms, you start to really notice the latency and it becom

It's about two things: 1) latency, 2) cost. For the latency: 100ms is where the threshold is. Above 100ms, you start to really notice the latency and it becomes annoying to the point that you even start making mistakes while typing. Let's take an example: the average latency from my home laptop to a server in the AWS cloud is 20ms. If I add a GUI remote solution (such is Xpra, which is pretty good wrt latency), the latency increases to 60-80ms (and this is just for remoting a single GUI app like VSCode, but not the whole desktop). Now you add a latency of the app itself, which for VSCode is about 50ms. The total latency becomes 110-130ms. So latency-wise the experience of working with a cloud desktop is noticibly worse than my local developer laptop. For the cost: my developer laptop costs about $1500. 16 cores, 32 GB of RAM, 1TB SSD. The equivalent cloud desktop setup would probably be around $400 a month. So in just 4 months the cost of the cloud desktop will exceed the cost of the laptop. In my opinion, cloud desktops only make sense when you're not sure how much capacity you need. Is 4 or 8 cores enough for your work? 16 or 64GB of RAM? The cloud desktop setup is flexible. You need more you allocate more. But once the capacity is known, you should switch to your own hardware to significantly reduce the cost and actually improve the experience.