In one particular industry that is rife with cloud desktops you can be trusted to invest or trade $X mln dollars of someone else’s money on a daily basis, or to model out a $Y billion dollar M&A deal, but God forbid you try to install VSCode or MobaXTerm on your own.

IT presumably got tired of being bombarded with application install requests, so one solution is to use vendorized cloud desktops that come with pretty easy tools (for them) to install applications.

I feel this so much.

Linux avoids this problem mostly because it doesn't have much commercial software to pirate in the first place.

I've travelled to and through countries (e.g. in the Gulf, France, India) with my work laptop where I was deeply uncomfortable having those data on hand. Taking a clean machine and remoting into that one when needed removes a lot of paranoia points.

Totally agree. If I’m going somewhere suspect, I travel with a clean, old laptop and pull what I need when I need it.

(which are both viable, but there is a different number of drawbacks to each)

Please don't say something like you don't trust encryption. We have known cases where even state actors could not crack encrypted devices. Not to mention the remote communication you have would be easier to monitor and possibly decrypt anyway.

Sure, in theory you would need a kill switch in case some special forces come through your window while you are working on you laptop and force you to remove your hands from it but but I doubt you live such an interesting life for that to be a realistic treat model.

While this is a good idea, note that in some countries it is an offence to not hand over keys or passwords when requested (or can rapidly become one - like in the UK) so not carrying data with you in the first place can defend against that.

I think there are solutions to make hidden partitions. You would have have to create a clean, plausible system to show potential attackers.

Still feel that clouds providers are a bigger attack surface than encrypted local data. To get you cloud data an attacker would just need to be able to compel you to give the password. With local data, they also need to get physical access to it. You could for example decide to not take your laptop to a potential dangerous meeting and store it somewhere safe.

Plus, cloud provider have way more attack surface area. They get regularly hacked. Some state actors already have back doors or can otherwise compel the provider to hand out your data.

The more I think about the more I think storing sensitive data in the cloud is not a good idea for privacy and security.

Here's my thinking: If you're travelling to a country with nosy officials and you needed access to a lot of sensitive data, if it were on your regular (but encrypted) hard drive then it would be more visible if they asked to see the machine. With that data online, it could be in a system you only access by a URL you remember which they can't see. You can show them a normal desktop.

Still feel that clouds providers are a bigger attack surface than encrypted local data.

If you are actively being targeted, I agree. I was thinking more the "curious official" folks seem to run into when travelling. Since the mere possession of certain plain text documents is a criminal offence in my country, this has the potential to catch people unawares.

I think there are solutions to make hidden partitions. You would have have to create a clean, plausible system to show potential attackers.

This is a good tradeoff and would probably be fine unless they're really out for you - a whole other ballgame.

The fact that a) the cloud provider is in a different jurisdiction b) many countries have very broad "anti-hacking" laws that they'd be breaking. It's not by any means a "naturally safe" way of working, but under the current hodgepodge of laws it has some benefits.

In my opinion, developing is not a really good use case. Some of our team develops using VSCode + SSH against a remote VM.

One of the best use cases we've found is education and, specifically, trade schools. There are some trade school courses that require really specific software (image and sound, designing electronics, interacting with proprietary robots, etc.), and it's a painful experience to manage all of that, add new programs, etc. (some trade schools have 60+ courses, each one having different subjects and different software through the year!) By having cloud desktops, the teacher can create a template with their requirements and share that template with the students, and if the requirements change, it's as simple as modifying the template and sharing it again.

Also, most of the public schools here are underfunded, so they end up with really old machines, and the cost of renewing a whole classroom gets really high: let's say a new machine costs between 600€ and 1000€ (depending on the trade course requirements). If you have 30 machines for each classroom, it's something around 24k. (Then there are lots of classrooms, you get the idea)

By having "cloud" desktops, there's no need for renewing old hardware, since you can have something like xfce + the viewer, and all the systems can easily manage that load (we even have classrooms with RPIs), and this can be a huge money saving

In the end, cloud desktops aren't the best option for all the use cases, as the author puts it:

> Overall, the most important thing to take into account here is that your users almost certainly have more use cases than you expect, and this sort of change is going to have direct impact on the workflow of every single one of your users. Make sure you know how much that's going to be, and take that into consideration when suggesting it'll save you money.

If you want access to your desktop from multiple locations. Ex, at my local hospital the staff can tap their badge to any computer and instantly reconnect to their desktop exactly where they left off.

If you are in a multi-site scenario but your big LOB app hates the internet so you need all your clients to be in the same building as the server. This is actually the reason I deploy vmware horizon... im not sure what jack henry and Fiserv are doing to make their overblown CRUD apps so network heavy and inefficient to operate, but I'm happy they are finally rolling out their own cloud-first apps so they can deal with their own garbage instead of outsourcing their support to their customeres IT guys.

If you literally just can't acquire hardware because of a pandemic and need more compute than you have on hand.

Instead, with a remote desktop you are only adding a bit more of vulnerabilities. It can never remove any.

(About those others, there exist some nice works about program portability, that culminated on fully distributed OSes, but those have no adoption. Instead, people prefer to hack distribution over the piles of hacks that are modern OSes. Obviously, it doesn't work well.)

All our staff seem happy and we don't get complaints. Author hasn't tried modern tools it seems.

Another use case: mobile people with laptops, who sometimes want to hop in to a play test or show a game off to a vendor. No need for them to have a gaming laptop 99% of the time, when an X1 carbon + parsec to a beefy box work fine.

The fact that Microsoft failed at a dozen sync frameworks (as chat is for google, sync was for Microsoft) and in 2020 this is still not really doable.

Also, I still can't find a good guide for spinning up a desktop in AWS.