
Remote Desktop Protocol Improvements in Windows 10 - walterbell
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2016/01/11/remote-desktop-protocol-rdp-10-avc-h-264-improvements-in-windows-10-and-windows-server-2016-technical-preview.aspx
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justin66
Wow.

 _For example, with Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview we now enable OpenGL
applications with RemoteFX vGPU scenarios which enables support for additional
high-end engineering design applications that use OpenGL._

This strikes me as really huge. For a while one of the intrinsic advantages of
X over the Windows GUI was the ability to have remote, accelerated OpenGL
sessions over GLX. Linux GUIs have pretty much abandoned proper support of
this but Windows is getting it?

~~~
Grishnakh
Linux unfortunately has been getting worse in a lot of ways, as the old-timers
get too old/busy to bother with it, and the hipsters take over. A prime
example of this is Gnome3.

When Linus and his lieutenants retire, Linux is really going to go downhill
fast.

~~~
justin66
An interesting sentiment, but Linus and his lieutenants were never very
responsible for graphics.

I wonder what will happen when those guys retire but it might end up being
positive. Linus and his lieutenants have been spazzy about filesystem
advancements, a kernel debugger, and in general a bunch of other stuff.

Or maybe everyone will just use BSD.

~~~
Grishnakh
There's nothing stopping anyone from forking the Linux kernel and adding their
own advanced features if they think they're so valuable. Almost no one even
uses a vanilla Linus kernel; distros all have their own custom kernels. So the
fact that no one's bothered making a big competitor to Linus's kernel (which
of course would mostly be a drop-in replacement) means that either no one
thinks these things are useful, or no one's really competent enough to do it
(and willing to spend the time/effort). As for filesystem advancements,
they're working on btrfs; what more do you want?

~~~
justin66
> they're working on btrfs; what more do you want?

Ha ha ha etc.

~~~
Grishnakh
Wow, that's an intelligent answer.

~~~
justin66
I actually don't know if you were joking or not, but "what more do you want?"
sounds somewhat sarcastic to me. In any case, btrfs is a mysteriously sad,
pathetic response to ZFS. It's worth a chuckle regardless.

The short answer to the "what more do you want?" question is that I'd like
developers to come to their senses and adopt FreeBSD. Since that's not going
to happen... I don't know, a puppy? Or core linux devs acting with more taste.
I'll be fine if I don't get either.

~~~
Grishnakh
btrfs has better and more features than ZFS; it's just not as mature yet. And
ZFS can't be used in the Linux kernel because its license is incompatible. If
you have a problem with that, I suggest you complain to the owners of ZFS.

What's so great about FreeBSD? I see BSD people say that all the time, but you
never see much actual usage of BSD anywhere. Instead of almost all developers
being wrong, maybe you're the one who's wrong.

Acting with taste? That's completely irrelevant to technical issues.

~~~
justin66
> Instead of almost all developers being wrong, maybe you're the one who's
> wrong.

It's so hard to tell how much of what you're saying is meant to be taken
seriously or responded to.

Regarding BSD, it's worth spelunking through the comments here with a search
and then trying it for yourself. These forums run on FreeBSD, I'm not sure if
you knew that.

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lewisl9029
One problem I've always had with RDP is its UX/performance when it comes to
bandwidth-rich/ultra-low-latency environments like interacting with locally
running Hyper-V virtual machines.

VMware Workstation and VirtualBox have always had a better UX when it comes to
interacting with local VMs that is nigh indistinguishable from native. Whereas
using Hyper-V, for some reason we have to deal with graphical compression
artifacts everywhere and what sounds like 128kbps audio. Though I'm not sure
if this caused by a limitation of RDP or of Hyper-V itself.

Has this situation gotten any better with Windows 10's RDP/Hyper-V
implementation?

~~~
vardump
I've been using Windows 10 over RDP for about 1.5 years now. Performance is
pretty nice even over 4G. Often 30-60 fps. Text is very sharp and movement
(except when HiDPI is in use, see below), such as scrolling or moving windows
is fluid. Full screen video works just fine, be it Youtube in a web browser or
VLC. Complex websites with WebGL and flashy CSS effects work smoothly.

Two issues I've noticed:

1) Color accuracy is really bad. For example when scrolling a website,
sometimes you get yellow artefact blotches over white areas. Forget about
using this for anything that needs color accuracy. Other JPEG-like compression
artefacts are also present.

2) Performance becomes _very_ bad when display scaling is not default 1:1 at
server side, when using HiDpi. Compression artefacts go off the roof as well.
Text becomes very blurry.

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perlgeek
Are these enhancements to the protocol, or just the implementations? The
article doesn't seem to distinguish the two, which always makes me a bit
uneasy, because it could be a sign of not caring about the protocol as such
(and third-party implementations thereof).

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dingo_bat
The improvements are cool and all but IMO all this is unneeded if Windows just
had a proper terminal with lots of little utilities.

~~~
Aleman360
Powershell. Yea it looks different than bash but it's great.

But RDP solves different problems. I do UI development and use RDP to connect
to my work box from home. It's also used on Windows Server for Citrix-type
scenarios.

~~~
niels_olson
Comparing powershell to a UNIX command line is like bringing a tricycle to the
Tour de France.

~~~
Aleman360
Passing strongly typed objects between processes seems better than text and
streams, if only for auto complete.

~~~
acdha
That part is great. The problem with Powershell is that Windows doesn't have a
culture of using the shell in general or it being an area developers should be
good at, whereas Unix inherits half a century of a shell being the primary
means to control a system. This shows painfully any time you try to use
PowerShell seriously outside of Microsoft's core enterprise IT management –
documentation is non-existent, hard to find, out of date, incomplete, etc.
while many applications either don't support it at all or expose only limited
functionality, and so forth.

I think Niels had it exactly backwards: PowerShell is like taking your bike
from the Tour de France and trying to ride through a rural area with no roads.
All of the advanced technology doesn't help if you're trying to do something
which just isn't commonly done there.

The thing which I think will change that is Azure – almost any time I see
someone mention using PowerShell for real work, it involves Azure and that
seems likely to continue improving as people start doing the hybrid cloud
model. It's one thing to click around in a GUI when you periodically setup a
few gigantic servers or deploy every 3 months but it's quite a different world
when you are talking about running a dozen cloud servers for 3 hours.

~~~
UK-AL
The good news is that there is a Microsoft directive that major Microsoft
software should come powershell admin tools.

I think a lot of config gui's now just execute powershell underneath.

~~~
danielcampos93
Most of the stuff that comes out of azure UI just runs powershell stuff. The
release flow for new features tends to be powershell private preview ->
general availability of commandlets -> UI full release. Most of the Azure
stack has extra features that are never really ported to the UI.

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vernie
The biggest improvement I've seen is that I'm now automatically disconnected
after 10 seconds.

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swingbridge
Not a big Microsoft fan in general, but must admit that RDP is a nice protocol
with good performance relative to some of the other protocols.

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jrcii
This post doesn't mention it but I noticed that RDPing to a remote Windows
Server from Windows 10 now requires the server to be using a certificate.

~~~
ghurlman
It doesn't require one, unless your group policy (or local server policy) has
been set as such.

~~~
jrcii
That's not what I've seen. No policy has been changed on my Windows Server,
Windows 7 and prior RDP clients connect fine, Windows 10 clients refuse
because of lack of certificate.

~~~
gruez
I just tested on a fresh windows 10 install. Works fine.

