Can we just take a moment to talk about how awesome SSH is! I’m out in my garage where the wifi reception is horrible and coding on my dev server via SSH. Even at ~120kbps down and ~50kbps up, I’m still able to use vim and screen productively. This is incredible to me!
Having grown up with 28kbps dial-up internet at home, it’s just amazing to me when I see technology in 2020 that still works flawlessly under dial-up-like connection speeds.
I also first browsed the ‘net on a 28,800bps modem – although I remember e-mail and bulletin-boards on a 9,600bps modem. 9.6k sounds so slow today, but considering most information exchange at the time was ASCII text, it was all pretty responsive.
SSH really IS wonderful! Fairly recently I was able to comfortably SSH into, and export X from, a remote machine, getting fairly-responsive remote graphical windows displayed on my local machine. This doesn’t sound remotely impressive until I tell you my internet connection was a 2G mobile-phone connected to my netbook via USB, meaning the connection-speed was a theoretical max. 384kbps (when I had an EDGE signal), falling-back to GRPS at just 40kbps!
There’s no way I’d have been able to RDP into a Windows box on that connection, let alone open a full-screen application. Plus it’s far quicker and easier to ssh than messing-about with VNC or RDP: just a simple ‘ssh -CXl username remotehost’ and you’re done!
I love it when things are not outdated, just really efficient and good at what they do!
You should check out mosh. It makes intermittent connectivity a non issue by using udp encrypted to tunnel to a local ssh session. It’s pretty cool.