About using laptop as a client to powerful workstation at home

[modeonoff]

Hi, I have a powerful workstation at home. Since I need a laptop with 4K screen, lightweight and silent, somebody suggested me to get an ultraportable and use it as a terminal to login to powerful desktop at home. How does this work? What do I need? If I allow my workstation to be accessible from the outside world even I will set myself as the only user, will the workstation be unsafe?

 

[USAFRet]

Assuming Windows, Remote Desktop Connection. Built into the OS.
Or TeamViewer.

What, exactly, will you be doing with this setup?

However...opening your system and LAN to outside access is not without risk.

 

[jsmithepa]

Don't even think about gaming or modeling or any kind of high bandwidth video application because what these remote things do is to constantly scan your host screen, and shove all that gazillion video bits to your remote laptop, you will be at the mercy of Internet connection bandwidth. U gonna do maintenance, work a spreadsheet, that short of thing would be OK.

These remote Apps will have encryption built-in, so just be aware u will be making a "hole" in your firewall, and as long as u only allow it to do the minimum thing required, u should be OK.

 

[modeonoff]

Don't even think about gaming or modeling or any kind of high bandwidth video application because what these remote things do is to constantly scan your host screen, and shove all that gazillion video bits to your remote laptop, you will be at the mercy of Internet connection bandwidth. U gonna do maintenance, work a spreadsheet, that short of thing would be OK.

These remote Apps will have encryption built-in, so just be aware u will be making a "hole" in your firewall, and as long as u only allow it to do the minimum thing required, u should be OK.

I won't do gaming. Maybe some 3D CAD and some use of RTX GPU to do CUDA simulations remotely. Can these two applicaitons be done reasonably well? For CAD I need interactivity. For CUDA simulations, just send a command to the workstation, workstation does some work and return the simulation data. Then, do some data analysis from the laptop locally.

Is the current wifi bandwidth in public not good enough for 3D CAD? 30 years ago I used rlogin on a X- terminal to login to server to do some work. Any improvement in technology since then? There was no wifi at that time. Does the current wifi in public area allows us to do better than before?

 

[Alabalcho]

It's not public WiFi where the bottleneck is - it is your home' upload capacity.

rlogin/X-Term use completely different way of working - it is your (in this case) laptop who does the drawing, with server (workstation) sending high-level commands like "Draw a rectangle" over the link.

 

[jsmithepa]

So highly interactive apps is where you will find lag... what your host Internet upload speed?

U maybe able to test this locally by limiting your laptop NIC speed and see how it feels.