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And unfortunately it has become the norm in open-source to push out shiny-looking projects with pretty logos and UX but shoddy underlying technology and decepti

by torginus 11mo ago

And unfortunately it has become the norm in open-source to push out shiny-looking projects with pretty logos and UX but shoddy underlying technology and deceptive/overstated claims (looking at you Tauri). Thing thing uses RDP for communication which was designed for remotely administering servers over low speed networks. VirtualBox in contrast integrates at the driver level, and allows you to share the underlying GPU buffers, giving you a native experience that works for things like games or heavy apps. It integrates the Linux filesystem on a driver level as well.

jstanley 11mo ago
That's just progress. Things that used to be hard become easy. Things that used to be impossible become hard. Hard things become easy when for example it becomes feasible to connect to RDP instead of mucking about at the driver level. It will be more reliable but less performant.
mikaraento 11mo ago
Nit: RDP’s roots are more in multi-user windows like Citrix Metaframe than in remote administration. I’ve found it to perform better than the alternatives (remote X11, VNC, Chrome Remote Desktop) for remote GUIs. Nomachine is the only alternative that was close to its performance. (And before somebody jumps in to correct me - in ancient times X11 performed quite well over the network but modern Linux GUI apps are no longer designed to minimise X11 network traffic)
- yonatan8070 11mo ago
  From my personal experience (by feel, not scientific), NVIDIA GameStream is way faster than RDP. I used it with Sunshine and Moonlight.
  - Saris 11mo ago
    Things made for game streaming will be more responsive at the tradeoff of massive bandwidth usage in comparison. RDP can work over slow connections reasonably well.
    - Nextgrid 11mo ago
      Massive bandwidth usage and video compression artifacts. It's fine for games and media consumption, but may be problematic for office work. Remote desktop protocols prefer lossless compression to achieve pixel-perfect rendering, at the expense of framerate/latency. RDP is unique in that it's not just streaming, but integrates with Windows' GUI stack to actually offload compositing to the client. This however works less and less well with web and Electron apps which do not use native OS widgets.
- cheema33 11mo ago
  Agreed that RDP is very well designed. And we don't have an equivalent in Linux or Mac world. All competing protocols are a compromise. I am particularly impressed with good multi-monitor support in RDP. Competitions has had more than a decade to get it right. But I am unaware of any that does. If I connect remotely from a 2 monitor setup, disconnect and re-connect from my laptop with just a single display, it all magically works. Everything readjusts automatically. I don't know of any other remote desktop protocol/tool that does this so well.
ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
Why don't they just write a thin layer that interfaces Windows library calls to native Linux calls, possibly with a thin wrapper to shim it where nothing else quite fits? You could re-implement maybe some of the Windows libs as a "clean room project", given the functional description, that then hands off to an equivalent in Linux. There's probably a cool and snappy acroynm you could use, like Virtual Interface (with nearly) No Overheard, or "Vino".
wtcactus 11mo ago
Windows implementation of RDP is actually very good. You get a degree of responsiveness that is unachievable with neither Linux RDP implementation or any other product (maybe barring Parsec, that also doesn’t allow for Linux hosts). I know that RDP doesn’t work for gaming, but for anything else (even for CAD), it’s the best thing barring direct access to the machine (or, Parsec).
- torginus 11mo ago
  Yeah, but if the Windows app essentially draws into a GPU texture (which is mapped to a dmabuf buffer in the Linux kernel), you can just grab that texture and send it to the compositor. The overhead difference is like memcpy vs a very fast SQL database.
- knollimar 11mo ago
  wait is it viable to run CAD (specifically autocad/revit) in any of these? It's the last thing keeping me on Windows
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    I know this isn't the question you asked, but FreeCAD has made great strides.
  - fsh 11mo ago
    Yes, CAD software is perfectly usable via RDP.
  - DANmode 11mo ago
    I love your username. Willing to chat origin?
    - knollimar 11mo ago
      sorry if it's a disappointment, but it's a contraction of two video game characters (Knoll + Olimar).
Amekedl 11mo ago
Care to elaborate regarding tauri? I figured it has matured into a fine electron alternative.
- d3Xt3r 11mo ago
  Not OP, but I recall Tauri greatly overstating their memory usage claims. It is ultimately a browser running your "app", but just because it's not bundled with your app, doesn't make it consume any lesser RAM. And they even admitted that their benchmarks were wrong[1]. A lot of claims were also made about how Tauri is magically more performant than Electron apps and feels like a native app, but not only is this not true, on some platforms like Linux, Tauri apps are actually slower than Electron because the system webview it uses (generally WebKitGTK) is often slower and less optimised than the Chromium build that Electron ships with[2]. There's a bunch more claims due to it being "Rust" and all the memes that comes with that territory, but all that is basically irrelevant since your "app" is basically shitty javascript in the end. It's like putting lipstick and dressing up a pig, doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig. [1] https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/3162 https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/3162 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/tauri/comments/1kg5zb8/will_tauri_feel_snappier_than_an_electron_app/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.reddit.com/r/tauri/comments/1kg5zb8/will_tauri_f...
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    I can't believe people will still put in all of this work instead of just... using their system's native GUI. Mind-boggling.
    - SeasonalEnnui 11mo ago
      I've done both, I prefer embedded web views: - All the work is done in my high performance backend, where I joyfully optimise my hot loops to the assembly level. The web view is a thin layer on top. - HTML and CSS is a joy to work with in comparison to many UI toolkits. LLMs are better at supporting a web stack. - The UI zooms/scales, and is accessible with screen readers (looking at you, imgui). - Cross platform with low effort. IMO you have to be extremely careful not to pull in a whole frontend stack. Stay as vanilla as possible, maybe alpine.js or tailwind, and I've got hot reload set up so the developer productivity loop is tight when editing the view.
venturecruelty 11mo ago
Well yeah. The goal for most of these people is to pad a portfolio so they can either get or remain gainfully employed. We are in the performative software era. It's not about data structures or algorithms anymore, it's all about GitHub stars.

jstanley 11mo ago

That's just progress. Things that used to be hard become easy. Things that used to be impossible become hard. Hard things become easy when for example it becomes feasible to connect to RDP instead of mucking about at the driver level. It will be more reliable but less performant.

mikaraento 11mo ago

Nit: RDP’s roots are more in multi-user windows like Citrix Metaframe than in remote administration. I’ve found it to perform better than the alternatives (remote X11, VNC, Chrome Remote Desktop) for remote GUIs. Nomachine is the only alternative that was close to its performance. (And before somebody jumps in to correct me - in ancient times X11 performed quite well over the network but modern Linux GUI apps are no longer designed to minimise X11 network traffic)

yonatan8070 11mo ago
From my personal experience (by feel, not scientific), NVIDIA GameStream is way faster than RDP. I used it with Sunshine and Moonlight.
- Saris 11mo ago
  Things made for game streaming will be more responsive at the tradeoff of massive bandwidth usage in comparison. RDP can work over slow connections reasonably well.
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    Massive bandwidth usage and video compression artifacts. It's fine for games and media consumption, but may be problematic for office work. Remote desktop protocols prefer lossless compression to achieve pixel-perfect rendering, at the expense of framerate/latency. RDP is unique in that it's not just streaming, but integrates with Windows' GUI stack to actually offload compositing to the client. This however works less and less well with web and Electron apps which do not use native OS widgets.
cheema33 11mo ago
Agreed that RDP is very well designed. And we don't have an equivalent in Linux or Mac world. All competing protocols are a compromise. I am particularly impressed with good multi-monitor support in RDP. Competitions has had more than a decade to get it right. But I am unaware of any that does. If I connect remotely from a 2 monitor setup, disconnect and re-connect from my laptop with just a single display, it all magically works. Everything readjusts automatically. I don't know of any other remote desktop protocol/tool that does this so well.

ErroneousBosh 11mo ago

Why don't they just write a thin layer that interfaces Windows library calls to native Linux calls, possibly with a thin wrapper to shim it where nothing else quite fits? You could re-implement maybe some of the Windows libs as a "clean room project", given the functional description, that then hands off to an equivalent in Linux. There's probably a cool and snappy acroynm you could use, like Virtual Interface (with nearly) No Overheard, or "Vino".

wtcactus 11mo ago

Windows implementation of RDP is actually very good. You get a degree of responsiveness that is unachievable with neither Linux RDP implementation or any other product (maybe barring Parsec, that also doesn’t allow for Linux hosts). I know that RDP doesn’t work for gaming, but for anything else (even for CAD), it’s the best thing barring direct access to the machine (or, Parsec).

torginus 11mo ago
Yeah, but if the Windows app essentially draws into a GPU texture (which is mapped to a dmabuf buffer in the Linux kernel), you can just grab that texture and send it to the compositor. The overhead difference is like memcpy vs a very fast SQL database.
knollimar 11mo ago
wait is it viable to run CAD (specifically autocad/revit) in any of these? It's the last thing keeping me on Windows
- fragmede 11mo ago
  I know this isn't the question you asked, but FreeCAD has made great strides.
- fsh 11mo ago
  Yes, CAD software is perfectly usable via RDP.
- DANmode 11mo ago
  I love your username. Willing to chat origin?
  - knollimar 11mo ago
    sorry if it's a disappointment, but it's a contraction of two video game characters (Knoll + Olimar).

Amekedl 11mo ago

Care to elaborate regarding tauri? I figured it has matured into a fine electron alternative.

d3Xt3r 11mo ago
Not OP, but I recall Tauri greatly overstating their memory usage claims. It is ultimately a browser running your "app", but just because it's not bundled with your app, doesn't make it consume any lesser RAM. And they even admitted that their benchmarks were wrong[1]. A lot of claims were also made about how Tauri is magically more performant than Electron apps and feels like a native app, but not only is this not true, on some platforms like Linux, Tauri apps are actually slower than Electron because the system webview it uses (generally WebKitGTK) is often slower and less optimised than the Chromium build that Electron ships with[2]. There's a bunch more claims due to it being "Rust" and all the memes that comes with that territory, but all that is basically irrelevant since your "app" is basically shitty javascript in the end. It's like putting lipstick and dressing up a pig, doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig. [1] https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/3162 https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/3162 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/tauri/comments/1kg5zb8/will_tauri_feel_snappier_than_an_electron_app/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.reddit.com/r/tauri/comments/1kg5zb8/will_tauri_f...
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  I can't believe people will still put in all of this work instead of just... using their system's native GUI. Mind-boggling.
  - SeasonalEnnui 11mo ago
    I've done both, I prefer embedded web views: - All the work is done in my high performance backend, where I joyfully optimise my hot loops to the assembly level. The web view is a thin layer on top. - HTML and CSS is a joy to work with in comparison to many UI toolkits. LLMs are better at supporting a web stack. - The UI zooms/scales, and is accessible with screen readers (looking at you, imgui). - Cross platform with low effort. IMO you have to be extremely careful not to pull in a whole frontend stack. Stay as vanilla as possible, maybe alpine.js or tailwind, and I've got hot reload set up so the developer productivity loop is tight when editing the view.

venturecruelty 11mo ago

Well yeah. The goal for most of these people is to pad a portfolio so they can either get or remain gainfully employed. We are in the performative software era. It's not about data structures or algorithms anymore, it's all about GitHub stars.