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Comment by RomanPushkin

1 year ago

There are many. For example, you're leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there. The same for remote desktops.

Another use case if when you have a long-running meeting, and still need to share. I found I sometimes just do not sit and listen for those 1-2 hours meetings, but prefer to code.

And for those of us who just don't like audio, like myself. I have many students who I am willing to help, but I don't wanna get audio-involved. My voice chat is not a very parallelable resource.

> leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there

What could be going on when you're not home?

If this is meant as a security tool, the fact you have to look at it is a non-starter.

If this is meant as anything else, why wouldn't you use VNC?

  • VNC doesn't even share your screen, it creates its own offscreen screen and doesn't even load your desktop, and uses some unusable minimalist window manager with a stupid X cursor. Yeah I could probably figure out how to get it to work but it's a chore. Terrible product design.

    I've been wanting to create something WebRTC based, I'm not happy with either VNC or RDP.

    • On Windows, you do share the screen. I haven't seen any VNC servers that give you a new session like Terminal Services would.

      On Linux, I've used both kinds of VNC server. One does start a new X instance, while the other one shares your main X instance. At the time I tried it, it was "TightVNCServer" to get a new X instance, and "X11vnc" to share the existing session.

Monitoring a remote machine makes a lot of sense. I'm still not totally getting how it can work for live collaboration, but if it works for you that's great. I do love the minimalist efficiency.

  • I don't think it's meant for live collaboration. Given that the OP is pretty focused on overcoming time restrictions, all-day remote machine monitoring seems like exactly the kind of use case they had in mind.

> There are many. For example, you're leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there

On what, your primary desktop?

Maybe you are just a bit Windows-centric but I would guess many of us run virtual desktops and/or other means of remote access such as ssh.

For general monitoring, maybe have a look at state of the art solutions, like https://prometheus.io/

I think adding audio would open interesting use cases though. People hate video, but 1fps isn't video. Audio still feels like an compelling feature. IMO..

>For example, you're leaving your home computer and going to work. Save a link and see what's going on there.

Doesn't this require leaving the computer unlocked?