Yet another Hacker News

42 points Nefarius 3 hours ago 30 comments

franga2000 1 hour ago | parent

I really don't get why redhat decided to kill SPICE. It was the only thing that got using a VM on open source virtualization (e.g. proxmox) close to the experience of using one on vmware.

VNC is truly the worst remote desktop protocol you can have. Bad latency, bad quality, bad integration.

g8oz 52 minutes ago | parent

100% agree. VNC is well past its prime.

Tostino 52 minutes ago | parent

I did all of my development for a couple years on my first startup in a VM on my proxmox server, connected through spice. Was extremely nice being able to just go from desktop to laptop to any other machine that I had available and have the same environment available everywhere.

It's been a few years and I haven't had a need for it recently, but it's sad to hear that they stopped supporting it.

x3haloed 46 minutes ago | parent

Now that NoMachine 10 has no free option, I’ve decided that I should try to burn some tokens on making a good, performant remote desktop system. I’m targeting moonlight-like performance with Windows RDP-like user experience. Cross-platform.

https://github.com/x3haloed/ascry

I don’t need my particular repo to be the one where this gets solved, but now that coding agents are really good, we shouldn’t have to put up with paying for shit software anymore, IMO.

Magniquick 29 minutes ago | parent

404 for me

indigodaddy 29 minutes ago | parent

404

rwmj 36 minutes ago | parent

Not enough people want to pay for VDI basically, certainly compared to how much it costs to maintain it. SPICE at the time that we abandoned it "only" supported 2D and video compression, which is complicated enough, but everyone wanted 3D support which would have added another labyrinthine stack on top.

Also the code at the time was a massive security nightmare, written with no validation of fields in the network protocol. It was unmarshalling stuff off the network and sending it directly to X11 libs without even bounds checking. (I sincerely hope this has improved.)

With that said, I wish the project well. SPICE is a much better user experience than VNC, especially if you're looking for something that supports audio, video and USB passthru.

c0l0 1 hour ago | parent

As an irregular user of spice (via Proxmox PVE), I wish the stars would align for QEMU to gain support for sunlight/moonlight streaming directly in the hypervisor. That'd be a killer app for VDI-style infrastructure, now that accelerated guest graphics via Venus, VirtIO GPU, and Intel's support for SR-IOV is finally coming together.

matja 46 minutes ago | parent

> I wish the stars would align for QEMU to gain support for sunlight/moonlight streaming directly in the hypervisor.

I didn't know I wanted it until you said it.

I have a few QEMU VMs where I use PCI-passthrough of a whole GPU and a USB controller, and wire the display and USB outputs physically into a KVM switch - works great, but not having to fiddle with the KVM (and run out of physical ports) would be - indeed, killer app.

woleium 52 minutes ago | parent

The lack of a decent SPICE client for mac is disappointing, it’s one if my greatest proxmox frustrations

Edit: great work on this fork, by the way.

IshKebab 49 minutes ago | parent

That is one creepy image.

hughes 40 minutes ago | parent

Yeah - was the brony/furry mascot original to the service or added by OP?

DaSHacka 26 minutes ago | parent

Its the OP's profile picture, edited with a Red Hat fedora.

KronisLV 10 minutes ago | parent

Probably not everyone's thing, but nice layout and color choice! I like the way how it slightly overlaps the surrounding text, but doesn't make it unreadable.

IndrekR 49 minutes ago | parent

Major confusion for me, as SPICE is well known circuit simulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE

Using it often. Mostly via ngspice nowadays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngspice

chrisandchris 45 minutes ago | parent

People who work with virtualization on Linux will (hopefully) all know what SPICE is.

Edit: typo

IndrekR 41 minutes ago | parent

> with visualization on Linux

You mean ‘virtualization’ here, I guess.

kazinator 40 minutes ago | parent

I would never call a software project SPICE; I use a fucking search engine when naming things to avoid the cringe of ignorantly landing on a dupe. (And also use SPICE in the LTSpice incarnation; I should give ngspice a spin one of these days.)

kragen 5 minutes ago | parent

You're absolutely fucking right.

Ngspice is okay but it's a bit clumsy switching between it and xschem.

Animats 3 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. The SPICE electronics simulator is over fifty years old, and is still very important to people who have to design electronics. It's inside many other electronics design tools. It's standard enough that when a manufacturer comes out with a new analog IC, they often provide a SPICE model for it. Otherwise nobody wants to design it into their circuit. Reusing the name for another program is like calling something new FORTRAN.

(I had nothing to do with SPICE, other than as a user. It's by Laurence Nagel, and I'm John Nagle. Not related.)

pjmlp 13 minutes ago | parent

Indeed, it was what we used in digital circuits lab exercises back in the 90's.

bityard 37 minutes ago | parent

I guess I hadn't been paying attention. Is this just the Windows SPICE client that Red Hat has abandoned, or are they moving toward dropping SPICE altogether? Does Red Hat no longer have a VDI product? (I'm sure they did at one point.)

Regardless, thanks for picking this up, OP.

rwmj 32 minutes ago | parent

Yes, Red Hat dropped SPICE support quite some time ago. Apparently in RHEL 8.3: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5414901 It's definitely not part of any current Red Hat product. See my other reply for why this is.

I don't think we have a VDI product as such, assuming you discount VNC which we do support but is hardly a full VDI solution.

indigodaddy 30 minutes ago | parent

I used to use x2goserver which was and still is awesome.

These days I prefer docker-based KASM Workspaces, or if you just want a nice GUI over your "bare-metal" VM or server then KasmVNC is great and easy to setup (not that KASM Workspaces is hard to setup)

https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm https://github.com/kasmtech/KasmVNC

krautburglar 25 minutes ago | parent

redhat spice driver was always touch and go — like every other linux well poisoning they do.

x11rdp has been good to me.

rwmj 20 minutes ago | parent

You mean the closed source code that Red Hat acquired when we bought Qumranet for $100 million, then open sourced, maintained at a loss for many years, and is now (still) open source and available to everyone to use as they wish?

danilocesar 23 minutes ago | parent

The major challenge is not keep it building and compatible. The major challenge is to keep up with security issues.

I wish op all the best, it's a tough journey

seymon 10 minutes ago | parent

Is there a good alternative to SPICE beside VNC?

kragen 6 minutes ago | parent

SPICE is not in any danger of dying; it's the thing every analog EE uses to simulate their circuits, and has been for 40 years. This remote desktop thing needs to change its name.