I recently had the unfortunate situation of watching my girlfriend struggle with doing her job (QC for a AAA game publisher) via RDP (and over a VPN).
I looked at Parsec as a solution and it.. didn't work.
Although watching her do normal things over the RDP/VPN combo was still painful, writing emails or using internal chat applications was incredibly latency ridden..
But it made me think very seriously about cloud resources and how we interact with them, especially when it comes to writing text...
Does anyone know of any IDE that is purely remote? as in you type locally and it's automatically syncing in the background on save?
The idea of running your unit tests and compile jobs in the cloud is really appealing, and you don't incur the latency of rendering the UI remotely.
Going further are there any web Linux desktops? Like whole UI, text rendering and input is on a client's side browser. So also graphics with caching and video playback is just sending already encoded data through the wire. Video may need reencoding in case of non-web codecs though. It does not need to do any HTTPS, there is SSH, VPN, WireGuard and Zerotier.
WIP projects are also interesting for me.
Also I was thinking - would it be possible to at least have a virtual VAAPI driver that would send the encoded video straight over the connection and integrate it with something like Xpra? Because I had done some VPN/RDP like sessions via Xpra and videos are the biggest pain really.
Like Apache Guacamole? It sits between your client and server and turns the RDP/VNC connection to the server into a webapp for the client: https://guacamole.apache.org/
I tried it a few years ago and found it cumbersome to set up though.
I don't know about purely remote, but I use Emacs, and I've been doing most of my work through TRAMP mode (which uses SSH to access a remote shell and load/save/list files).
I'm working with Clojure mainly right now, so I TRAMP into my large dev machine, and CIDER will automatically connect the interactive REPL, debugger, etc. through SSH rather than locally. All of the editor functionality; syntax highlighting, keys, extra modes etc.; is running on the local machine, but the running instance and the filesystem are remote. It's a good way to go.
The other thing I've done in the past is use Syncthing to sync the working directory between a remote and a local machine; but this can have some latency issues (it generally takes about a second for a saved file to sync, probably because of internal anti-thrashing timers in Syncthing), so TRAMP is much better.
What's the difference between a purely remote IDE vs ssh-ing into a server with VSCode? The latter is my current setup for a homework that requires multi-cpus.
When editing files, there's no really perceived latency because the files are cached locally. Only drawbacks is having pre-installed programs (on a shared server) and navigating through folders via a terminal.
I looked at Parsec as a solution and it.. didn't work.
Although watching her do normal things over the RDP/VPN combo was still painful, writing emails or using internal chat applications was incredibly latency ridden..
But it made me think very seriously about cloud resources and how we interact with them, especially when it comes to writing text...
Does anyone know of any IDE that is purely remote? as in you type locally and it's automatically syncing in the background on save?
The idea of running your unit tests and compile jobs in the cloud is really appealing, and you don't incur the latency of rendering the UI remotely.