TigerVNC/Xvnc over SSH would probably work okay. Xpra adds some tricks and H.264 video compression to make X forwarding more bearable, so that might work - it even has an HTML5 client that works over SSL, in case you only have access to a web browser. I know that basic X forwarding over SSH won't give me anywhere near adequate performance for comfortable use. LTSP and Thinstation don't seem to exactly align with the single-user headless usecase. I also found that security features in Docker mean that not everything in the guest OS works right out of the box, but that's just something I'm going to deal with as it comes.īefore we move on, let's discuss the different options available for how to remotely control our development environment from the laptop. Still, all of this isn't great- if there are ever any forward-incompatible kernel ABI changes then our Arch guest's libc might try to make system calls that the Debian host kernel doesn't understand. systemd-nspawn is maybe more fit-for-purpose when running a whole guest OS in a container, but it lacks some of the convenience features provided by Docker, especially around automation and network configuration. It would be possible to do all of this with vagrant - there's even an archlinux box - but I want to play around with containers. I'll expose the container to the outside internet through an SSH tunnel so that I can access it wherever I am in the world. So the plan will be to use Docker to run Arch in a container. My Linux server runs headless Debian, which is nice for a server but not really ideal for my development workflow.
When I saw that Lenovo had a Black Friday sale on an inexpensive laptop ($129!) with good build quality but anemic specs, I had an idea: why not use this cheap laptop as a thin client for a remote development environment? I have a server at home that can do all of the heavy lifting, which should mean that the laptop gets great performance without sacrificing on cost, weight, or battery life. I've been keeping my eyes open for a new development workstation powerful enough for Scala compilation in a laptop form factor.
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