> I've been doing dev on a citrix desktop, where a single keypress can take seconds to register.
Why would that be slow, though? Citrix would only be like that if you were over a high-latency network connection - that's unavoidable. If it is a LAN connection then the Citrix box is overloaded: add more RAM and processor cores (and disable the page-file: disk IO is a big killer of VDI UX).
The problem with the Electron apps mentioned is that it's a reflection of the sad state of affairs that we have crappy UX caused by bad technical decision-making, rather than a crappy UX just because the hardware is underprovisoned.
Yeah, it's natural that remote desktop is bad in bad connection even if Citrix is well made. But it can be said that adopting VDI over Citrix solution for developer machine is a mistake, something like adopting Electron.
> But it can be said that adopting VDI over Citrix solution for developer machine is a mistake
That's debatable - certainly in many cases it makes a lot of sense: e.g. a corporate environment with hot-desking (i.e. Windows Roaming Profiles), but programmer/dev users need a consistent workspace so they can't use roaming profiles, instead having consistent and persisted VDI environment makes sense.
Another reason is that you can pre-image and snapshot an entire OS environment more easily (and even more easily if you're using a Hyper-V VDI instead of a multi-user Terminal Services or Citrix VDI) which is great for ensuring everyone on a team has the exact same build/dev/test environment. This is being reinvented as "Code Spaces" which GitHub and Visual Studio seem to be really getting behind: https://github.com/features/codespaces and https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move...
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But I'd wager that most devlop-in-Citrix/TermServ situations are in "normal" corporate businesses with "no fun allowed" IT policies, and even if they don't have a hot-desk office policy they probably still don't like the idea of anyone having root/admin access to their own machines. (I'm fortunate to have never been in that situation in my working life, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from friends who did short-term contract dev work on-site for companies like Tesco and the like)
My impression is that some parts of Windows force animations to play out fully (probably not allowed to skip keyframes?) instead of real-time. So when something is animated, and the connection is bad, it takes ages for the animation to finish. Also, animations stay enabled in the first place in some places when using RDP is a bug in itself. This seems to be mostly the case in Microsofts own UWP apps. I distinctly remember the pain of the "!&§/$+ Edge full-screen logon "make me your browser already" nag, it literally took five minutes for that dumb IE-to-edge logo animation to play, blocking the entire desktop while doing so.
Why would that be slow, though? Citrix would only be like that if you were over a high-latency network connection - that's unavoidable. If it is a LAN connection then the Citrix box is overloaded: add more RAM and processor cores (and disable the page-file: disk IO is a big killer of VDI UX).
The problem with the Electron apps mentioned is that it's a reflection of the sad state of affairs that we have crappy UX caused by bad technical decision-making, rather than a crappy UX just because the hardware is underprovisoned.