59 pointsby Nefarius5 hours ago15 comments
  • IndrekR2 hours ago
    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

    • weinzierlan hour ago
      Once interviewed for an automotive embedded software position and they asked me if I was familiar with SPICE. Naturally assumed they meant the circuit simulator, answered yes and they did not dig deeper

      Only later in the job I realized that they had meant Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination.

      • classified30 minutes ago
        dEtermination. Also quite confusing.
    • kazinator2 hours ago
      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.)
      • Animatsan hour ago
        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.)

      • kragenan hour ago
        You're absolutely fucking right.

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

    • RobRivera3 minutes ago
      I am happy I am not alone in this
    • chrisandchris2 hours ago
      People who work with virtualization on Linux will (hopefully) all know what SPICE is.

      Edit: typo

      • IndrekR2 hours ago
        > with visualization on Linux

        You mean ‘virtualization’ here, I guess.

      • nocman19 minutes ago
        Nope. I work with virtualization on Linux every day, and have done so for many years (and many varieties of virtualization). I didn't recognize it by the name, and I don't remember hearing about it before.
    • pjmlpan hour ago
      Indeed, it was what we used in digital circuits lab exercises back in the 90's.
  • c0l02 hours ago
    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.
    • matja2 hours ago
      > 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.

    • johng36 minutes ago
      This would be ideal. I've been reading about Moonlight a lot lately, and it's many children. I'm building a new home theater set up and will be trying it soon.
  • franga20002 hours ago
    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.

    • rwmj2 hours ago
      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.

    • x3haloed2 hours ago
      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.

      • CamperBob2an hour ago
        Did the same thing. Added the exact features I wanted/needed to FreeRDP and had Claude generate a lightweight server from scratch. Bye, bye, TeamViewer, Windows RDP, and VNC.
      • Magniquick2 hours ago
        404 for me
      • indigodaddy2 hours ago
        404
    • Tostino2 hours ago
      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.

    • Davieyan hour ago
      and insecure by default
    • g8oz2 hours ago
      100% agree. VNC is well past its prime.
  • bityard2 hours ago
    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.

    • rwmj2 hours ago
      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.

  • indigodaddy2 hours ago
    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

  • danilocesar2 hours ago
    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

  • kragenan hour ago
    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.
    • II2IIan hour ago
      The page doesn't make what SPICE is for obvious, aside from linking to other pages, but they are not talking about the circuit simulation tool. (It appears to be some sort of tool for accessing desktops of virtual machines remotely.)
      • kragen37 minutes ago
        I have the impression that you could also use it for accessing desktops of real machines remotely, too, but that's only because I keep running into it when I'm looking for information about the real SPICE, a 50-year-old open-source program used to design every computer you've ever used and for which the IEEE awarded Donald Pedersen the Medal of Honor.
  • gbraad19 minutes ago
    Why the pony with the hat if they do not sponsor it.
    • Nefarius16 minutes ago
      Because it's funny.
  • ueckeran hour ago
    I wish somebody would build a C version of xpra which does only has the client side for latency hiding and manages the remote caching using X11 messages only.
  • arisudesu32 minutes ago
    I'd rather you refuse to let ViGEmBus die. :)
    • Nefarius24 minutes ago
      I said all there is to say about it a while ago :P
  • seymonan hour ago
    Is there a good alternative to SPICE beside VNC?
  • woleium2 hours ago
    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.

    • c-hendricksan hour ago
      There's one that at least works fairly well, but it's paid. aSPICE Pro.
  • IshKebab2 hours ago
    That is one creepy image.
    • KronisLVan hour ago
      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.
    • hughes2 hours ago
      Yeah - was the brony/furry mascot original to the service or added by OP?
      • DaSHacka2 hours ago
        Its the OP's profile picture, edited with a Red Hat fedora.
      • hn92726819an hour ago
        Specifically, this looks like a drawing of the character Fluttershy. If it is an OC mascot, that would be weird because it looks just like her.
        • Nefariusan hour ago
          It is OC with an obvious, heavy influence.
    • Nefariusan hour ago
      SCNR :D
  • krautburglar2 hours ago
    redhat spice driver was always touch and go — like every other linux well poisoning they do.

    x11rdp has been good to me.

    • rwmjan hour ago
      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?
      • krautburglar35 minutes ago
        Whether RH paid $100M for this well poisoning, or however much more/less it pays its staff developers to do the same (i.e. wayland, systemd...), the effect is the same: more churn & instability in the Linux space.
  • 2 hours ago
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