What, you've never sshed into a remote machine?

i think this thread is separating the beginners from the veterans.

I think what the GP was talking about is more like RDP for a development environment.

yeah sure, vnc. which works fine over the internet.

it even works fine over ssh, over vpn, over the internet, over 3g, in an airplane!

it's turtles all the way down.

The nicest thing about Cloud9 is being open source you can install it on your own hardware so those VMs don't have to be remote.

Unless something has changed since last year, it is not truly "open source" if you're going by the Open Source Initiative's definition of "open source".

Evidently there are a number of restrictions placed on the source code that prevent this from being the case. There was a Reddit discussion about it at the time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2vvs7i/cloud9_...

It is most definitely open source it is just not unconditional, maybe that will change now.

https://github.com/c9/core

In my university we have been using remote VMs with a GUI (e.g. Windows) for more than 10 years. We need to this with several softwares due to license restrictions.

Every cloud provider is essentially providing a remote vm. Been working great for me for the past 10 years.

I think the parent means graphical VM.

Guess that's all a matter of where in the US you are. It's a big country.