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by sz4kerto 1549 days ago
We're moving our whole company to this product right now. Instead of buying (and upgrading) more and more powerful laptops for our (fully remote) dev team, we just get them whatever thin&light stuff they want, and a dedicated server with large RAM so that they can run the whole test environment easily. There are some rough edges here and there, but it's a game changer.
2 comments

Thin clients are back on the menu.

I wanted to transition to this development model a year ago, but unfortunately X11 forwarding was slow on mobile connections, and as far as I'm aware (if you know a workaround let me know), on Linux, RDP can't be made to just share a single app, only full desktop sessions.

We experimented with X forwarding, but it worked well only on e.g. local networks. Some people still ended up using X forwarding, but JB Gateway or VSC Remote is in a different league.

We have also tried Jetbrains Projector, which is basically a different rendering engine for Java Swing. A remote IDEA instance was rendering the UI through HTML, i.e. you could develop in a browser. It worked relatively well, but there were some issues around copy/paste, etc.

> It worked relatively well, but there were some issues around copy/paste, etc.

They have an electron-based client that improves on some of these issues that stem from running inside a browser:

https://jetbrains.github.io/projector-client/mkdocs/latest/i...

The only thing I've found to be half-ways usable is x2go. With it you can have a rootless window session. I still end up using VS Code Remote development tools a lot though.
Try Xpra, it's like X11 forwarding but much snappier.
Welcome back to telnet + X Windows into the UNIX development server.