I'm sorry if this sounds completely ridiculous to some people, but what do people use RDP/Windows server for in 2021? Given that ASP/Dotnet is portable to linux, what are people building that isn't better deployed to linux? It can't just be the legacy use-case, can it?
RDP is pretty easy to explain: if you need a GUI, RDP is infinitely smoother than VNC or anything else the Linux ecosystem has to offer. I even use it on Linux for things like livestreaming (OBS running in a minimal GUI like openbox). The are many similar workloads that are less "servers" and more "cloud workstations" that use GUI apps.
As for Windows in general, 90% of the Windows servers I see fall into one of the 2 categories: 1) they run some Windows-only software or 2) the sysadmins at the company know Windows, so that's what they use. If your company relies on something from 1), you're very likely also going to fall into 2).
Specific example: a company wanted to allow any employee to log in from any computer and be ablr to get work done. A VM terminal server was too heavy for their network and server budget and they already had decently powerful PCs, so they went with AD and that roaming accouts thing. They had to hire a Windows server sysadmin to manage it.
When they decided they also needed a good NAS, web server and backup system, they already had a Windows sysadmin on staff and the licences+over-spec required to run in on Win were still cheaper than hiring another sysadmin.
> RDP is pretty easy to explain: if you need a GUI, RDP is infinitely smoother than VNC or anything else the Linux ecosystem has to offer.
The last time I was assessing Windows remote * for performance, VNC* implementations with a mirror driver provided far better performance than vanilla RDP.
I have the complete opposite experience, but I only used RealVNC (not sure what mirror driver is). My experience is that the Windows RDP client and RDP server on any platfrom is >>> VNC in every way.
We use remote scripted Indesign instances for creating catalogues, which needs Windows to run, and RDP for debugging.
I'd love to hear about alternative solutions that don't require Windows, and still spit out colour-accurate CMYK indesign files; the printing shops won't accept anything else.
The most frustrating, and most fun moments I've had hacking on a computer has been scripting InDesign, so props for that!
Most printing shops I've had to treat with will also accept PDFs, is that the case? Because then, there's a case to be made for converting your templates to HTML (gives you access to a huge amount of tooling) and printing them to a PDF through a headless browser instance (like pptr.dev). That has worked for me in the past, and is accessible and good quality (though I did not need accurate CMYK, so YMMV).
Accurate CMYK is the crux here unfortunately; we've got a headless browser PDF setup already working for anything that's fine with "sRGB, probably?" in terms of colour accuracy, but there's a bunch of large companies with stricter requirements (and the budgets for it, thankfully).
(Though browser-based PDF isn't a panacea either. We've got one customer whose 250 page technical manual needs between 40 and 70 minutes to generate through paged.js and Chrome… They're fine with running it as an overnight job, but it's still painful to watch.)
Yeah, I get it, that sucks :/ I do know that PrinceXML has CMYK support so maybe check it out. Else you'd always have FrameMaker and the Server edition if you wanna go that much enterprise-y.
The last time I tried something like this, I quickly quit and used LaTeX. For all of its warts, it’s an excellent tool and it runs very quickly compared to a browser.
Jeez. Reminded of scripting quark with apple script. And photoshop cmyk tiff separations, I don't recall, but the workflow was scripted. I frankly can't imagine what that looks like today.
It really depends on how far away from the data center you are. I used to live close to Amsterdam and that felt basically local, even with a not-amazing internet connection. Right now I live in the Valencia (Spain), with a local and not very well paired ISP. There is lag, but it is just about acceptable for platformers and action/adventure games. I wouldn't recommend it for shooters.
The cost ended up being around 1€/hr when the instance was on, and 0.06€/day for the storage. I am sure this could be optimized (e.g. use snapshots and spot instance) - but I just couldn't be bothered to. For me it is worth it.
I don't use a local VM or bootcamp because I just don't have a powerful enough computer to run AAA games from the last 5 years or so - even earlier if the game is badly optimized. Now with an M1 they're not even compatible.
Stadia, GeForce NOW, Xbox Game Streaming and PlayStation Now: I've tried them all, and GeForce NOW specifically is very good. But, they only allow me to play a subset of my large pre-existing game library, and/or make me buy games again, which I'm not interested in.
Stadia is specially bad at this, having to purchase on a game-by-game basis, not being compatible with any existing ecosystem (Steam, PS, Xbox have cloud saves and friend lists), and then trusting Google to run my game forever on their servers after paying a one-time cost.
In a large scale enterprise environment, say 100k+ seats with a mix of MS Office, scientific/engineering use-cases, Windows, Linux & OSX, Windows is still the way to go for the forest, tying it in with JAMF and Linux integrations.
Less the legacy use-case than how do we integrate everything with everything.
.NET Core might be portable, however it is a tiny subset of what .NET Framework is capable of.
Additionally lots of enterprise shops, despite what HN crowd thinks, are mostly on Microsoft stacks, so that .NET application is going to connect to other APIs and stuff not available on GNU/Linux.
Then, many companies use VMs as desktops for contractors, you are just not allowed to plug anything on their network, so you are using Visual Studio via RDP/Citrix.
As an example, in life sciences most of the laboratory hardware only has APIs available via COM/.NET Framework.
I run many GUI apps remotely. I don't waste time porting stuff that works best on Windows to Linux (I have two machines). Not all use cases are development.
