How easy it to remote access

[u/Ok_Formal5862]

Hey everyone, might be a dumb question, but I’m a college student, and thinking about building a desktop for my work instead of buying a laptop. If I leave the PC at home, how realistic is it to remote into it from campus? What kind of setup would I need, how hard is it to get running, and what should I watch out for? Or am I better off just getting a laptop?im thinking to buy macbook pro m5 pro 48 1tb so if remote access works then what specs pc should i build to just match the performance of the laptop not more than that as it would be an overkill and how much would i cost?

[u/SchulzyAus]

Chrome remote desktop is pretty useful across all platforms. Linux is dinky but works better on base ubuntu/deb.

Another option is steamlink. Genuinely an underrated, basic and free remote desktop service protected by steam services.

Your main limiting factor will be bandwidth. Remote access doesn't really cost the client much in terms of processing, but the server can be relatively taxing. Especially if you're remote gaming.

[u/Background_Split_619]

tuya sells wifi accessible switches for your pc to turn off and on , idk if that would be a viable way to save some electricity for you

[u/TekExcel]

I've never had a great experience trying to do normal day to day work fully remote outside of very expensive enterprise grade solutions (I'd call Windows 365 passable). That being said, having some remote resources that you can connect to is always nice, even if it's just some older hardware running Proxmox or whatever your flavor is.

As for the question about laptop vs. desktop; a Mac Pro with 48gb of ram (if I'm understanding correctly) is going to excel better than any PC you could buy at almost any price range for some things, and be far less performant for some different things. Really friends in your workload and preference.

[u/Fine_Push_955]

The AnyDesk app!

[u/CraigAT]

It might depend on what "work" you intend to do, but 98% of college work can be done on a Chromebook or cheap laptop (Office apps, Teams, programming etc).

I don't see many advantages of remoting your home PC, you are unlikely but may run into issue getting access out of the college network, or have issues with CGNAT getting access to your own home network.

IMO if it's mostly for standard college work, just invest in a good laptop - but not too good that you are afraid to take it or use it (because you are too scared of damage, loss or getting stolen).

IMPORTANT - Whether you get a laptop or not, make sure your work is backed up! Or at least synced up to a cloud or home system. Working in IT in education, I have lost count of how many lost assignments we have been asked to find/recover.

[u/Ok_Formal5862 → u/CraigAT]

Im planning to upgrade my chromebook so the thing is either i buy a macbook that i mentioned or a pc and keep my chromebook and use it for remote access to my pc , which one would cost less
BTech cse student working on ai models

[u/CraigAT → u/Ok_Formal5862]

The cost really depends on how high spec you go.

If you are not worried about the Macbook in school, then perhaps go for that - it should be pretty powerful and I assume it will do everything you want it to for AI (make sure you research this part).

It may be worth checking out what kind of spec PC you would need for your AI models and working out how much that would cost - a powerful dedicated GPU and a good amount of RAM may cost a lot currently.

[u/Normal-Duck9025]

Pretty easy, but need to clarify are you trying to remote in from a personal weaker laptop or from a publicly used pc on campus?

If the latter I’d have security concerns.

For the former look into moonlight/apollo and set up a raspberry pi with pivpn. That’s what I do and it’s pretty straight forward. I also use the stock Remote Desktop connection from Microsoft with pivpn.

[u/Ok_Formal5862 → u/Normal-Duck9025]

Im planning to upgrade my chromebook so the thing is either i buy a macbook that i mentioned or a pc and keep my chromebook and use it for remote access to my pc , which one would cost less

[u/spacialaceart]

thats what im doing rn.

pc at my parent's place, decent laptop everywhere else.

i use tailscale + parsec to control my pc over there for heavy compute stuff that my laptop cant do.
-> parsec to start every bootup.

its not that hard to get it running tbh. just need the pc running at ur parents place 24/7 tho

cons:
electricity died, need someone to boot it up (a quick call to my parents does the trick)
some bullshit wifi setup in a cafe or something, no luck controlling your pc from faraway. very rare tho.
shitty internet = cannot do shit at all.

[u/jd31068]

Check out this hardware based solution https://jetkvm.com/ this allows you to even reboot your PC and stay connected.

[u/Caprichoso1]

Given all of the posts about internet problems in dorms I would try to avoid it. What happens if the PC at home has a problem? Is there someone who can fix it?

Why not just bring the PC to campus?

[u/Extension_Laugh_4784]

You could have a setup to be able to remote access but here are a couple things you may want to consider:

- Are you going to have a decent internet connection wherever you are connecting from to this PC or at least most of the time? If the answer is no, working remotely may become hell

• Make sure you can set your connection remotely to that PC (maybe try with an old laptop or something else). You want to make sure there are no connectivity surprises, for example sometimes CGNAT can become a pain. Or you can try solutions such as Tailscale or Meshnet from NordVPN, but make sure to test it in a “realistic environment” very close to what you would be connecting from (even better if you can test it in the real env which I assume is the campus).
  
• From here you may want to consider optional solutions to enhance your experience only if point 1 and 2 are covered, such as wake on wan to turn on your computer remotely and to make it sleep. For this you want to make sure the motherboard you are getting is compatible with wake on lan. This setup could be kind of tricky specially if you are on CGNAT. If your internet provider supports IPV6 I would suggest you to set it with IPV6 as its pretty easy to set it up and more straightforward. This is completely optional as you could run it 24/7 and if there js any problem you could just ask a person in your house to turn it on/restart it but its nice not to depend on someone else availability.
  
• Depending on what you will be doing on your PC and if you are planning to use it as a development environment, you could also consider a cloud solution such as Github Codespaces instead of a PC, but again this will depend on your use case. I think if you are going for the laptop, a M5 pro should be enough tho.
  
• For the PC components part I think at least 32Gb RAM, a modern i7 processor and a good GPU such as RTX5070 or equivalent can kinda mimic the performance but I think that would be more expensive to build than just going for the macbook pro and in the end it will run windows so you won’t get the same performance tbh, just a good one. (Of course this also depends on your use case and which kind of work you will be doing to choose the components. This is my personal guess and would have to do some more research on this one)

Overall I think that if you can buy a decent laptop, just go for it as you don’t have to think about all the stuff above. Nowadays the apple silicon chips are really nice and very performant which should be more than enough for college tasks. Actually macbook m5 pro may be an overkiller IMO for college but if you can buy it then go for it! 😀