I work for a bulge bracket bank and have been on a VDI for the past five years, currently on my third desktop. This is extremely common in finance, most developers are running on VDI's since it's much easier to manage and lock down. First generation was terrible, 8GB RAM made life difficult. Second gen was much better, had that up until earlier this year. That one was based on Windows 7, so my firm was paying through the roof for extended support (7 was EOL a while back). Current VDI is actually based on Windows Server 2016, not Windows 10. Performance is respectable, I've got 64 GB RAM and 4 virtual cores, but business users get less powerful desktops that aren't as great. In my firm job title dictates what you get, so as a SWE I get better hardware than people on the business side, including those who may be doing data-heavy work in R/Python. My complaints:<p>* Machine loses settings since not everything was set up correctly. Outlook won't retain my settings for autoformat (disable everything), due to forced weekend reboots I have to redo my settings every Monday morning.<p>* Heavily locked down.<p>* Non-standard configuration, common Windows files aren't where you would expect them to be.<p>The good:
* Software request and installation fully automated, quite easy to get the applications I need with the caveat that the software is approved and packaged internally. I can select from a list of approved IDE's, for example, but if I want to use something less common, next to impossible to get it approved (tons of paperwork & reviews). Typically not a problem since most of what I want is available.<p>* Can log in from anywhere. No machine to lug around.