RDP doesn't perform even 0x better than the competition, like parsec.
For example, I'd say that I need:
A dropdown for a single option, with options: A, B, C
Actually, I think I'm just describing an analogue to HTML with the equivalent of CSS provided by the platform, but for native desktop toolkits (hopefully without the complexity of a browser engine).
Nvidia had a successful product as well before stadia. Hell I remember reading a use AWS GPU instances as a gaming machine blog posts before stadia.
But a few yrs in the big players in the cloud gaming industry figured out some critical latency issues around the controllers and optimizing delivery of the video feed. To the point where lag was almost non-existent on a good fiber connection. The datacenter stuff was obviously the core innovation though.
I still prefer to download my Xbox games to my series s/x but I spent a year playing Xbox cloud games exclusively and I could 100% see that being the default for a big part of the casual audience.
I mean, that is a thing xpra can do. Or, x11vnc can do it with some hoop-jumping.
Hopefully never.
I had my own server in the DC that I could then connect to from my desk using a multi-monitor SunRay terminal. At home I had a SunRay connecting in to the office with VPN. I could move between terminals by just inserting my smartcard in whichever terminal I was at. There was even a company creating a SunRay laptop called Gobi that I tried using , but a regular laptop with the software client was a much better experience.
These tiny machines were just way too slow to handle even the tiny amount of work they had to do. Also, everyone knows that X over network is just not made for modern applications ("modern" in the year 2000!). I worked with Matlab, and had a lot of fun trying to rotate 3D plots with a few thousand points. It was just unbearable.
Then of course the "single point of failure" thing. Network problems? No one can work. Main server has a drive failure? No one can work. Main server needs an upgrade? No one can work.
The Sun Rays had super-poor USB support. My ergonomic keyboard had no auto-repeat when connected to these things, absolutely impossible to fix or even debug. Then of course there was Sun software: although they invented Java, their JVM was leaking like a sieve and everything Java had to be restarted regularly. The Sun coreutils were just very limited compared to the GNU counterparts. We complained endlessly, and in the end, IT budged and we all got our dedicated Linux machines.
I remember that famous Larry Ellison speech in the 90s about how thin client/networked applications will be the future.
No. I don't think everyone knows that at all. At my university we used X terminals connected to a central Sun SPARCcenter 2000 over ethernet and it was fine. We used MATLAB, Maple V, SAS, etc etc.
It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you could insert your Sun employee ID – the same card used to get into the building – into a slot in the terminal. That authenticated you to the server and displayed your session instantly. Want to show a colleague something you’re working on? Just put your ID into their Sun Ray and show them exactly what you were doing. That was cool! It was a frictionless way to demo and collaborate.