Kasm Workspaces: Your Solution for Remote Desktops? Full Review!

[Music] thank you hello again everyone and welcome back to learn Linux TV a Linux related YouTube channel that just crossed 400 000 subscribers I can't believe it thank you guys so much I really appreciate your support in today's video I'm going to review an interesting piece of software actually it's more of a platform it's dubbed as the container streaming platform and what am I talking about well I'm talking about chasm Chasm itself is a container-based solution one that gives you quick access to applications and even entire Linux distributions right from within your favorite web browser and there's a great deal of potential use cases for a solution like this for example you can launch a web browser and then remove it along with its history you could try out a new distribution of Linux before you consider switching to it and you could even create workspaces to test applications create isolated work environments and more best of all Chasm can be self-hosted so you can run it on your own Hardware or within a virtual machine and like I mentioned in this video I'm going to give it a full review before I do though I need to point your attention to the ethics page on learnlinux.tv the official website for this channel there you'll find my ethics guidelines that I follow anytime I do a review as a short summary I don't allow any company to screen review videos before you guys get a chance to see them first and I also don't allow any creative feedback whatsoever during any portion of the review process this video just like any other review that I've done follows these guidelines for more information on the review policy for learn Linux TV you can check out the content ethics page that I'll have linked to Down Below in the description and also I'll show a link on the screen right now that you can use to visit that page directly now one more thing before we get started I need to take a moment and mention the sponsor for today's video if you're looking for a cloud provider that's affordable flexible and reliable then look no further than Akamai connected cloud with akamai's Cloud platform you can spit up Linux servers quickly and the platform contains all the features you'll need to deploy full-featured Solutions and using the marketplace you could easily deploy applications such as nexcloud Rocket chat Mastodon WordPress pie hole Plex Jenkins and many more in fact there's over a hundred applications available in the marketplace if you want to set up a custom Linux instance you could do that too all the popular Linux distributions are available on the platform including but not limited to Debian Centos Fedora Ubuntu and many others in fact even Arch Linux is available so check out Akamai connected cloud with the URL that you see on the screen right now which will do two things first it'll help support this channel which I'll really appreciate and it'll also get you 100 in starter credit to check out the platform and thank you yet again to Akamai for sponsoring this video anyway with all of that out of the way let's check out chasm for those of you that have never heard of this solution before let's go through a quick overview regarding what Chasm does as well as the goals that it aims to solve Chasm is a solution you can use to launch and manage container-based Solutions which are dubbed workspaces workspaces can present a single application an isolated web browsing session or even a complete desktop experience to get started with it you'll need a Linux server either a physical one or a virtual machine all you have to do is download the installer extract it and then run the install script that's located inside the process is very easy and the setup process takes care of everything for you after you answer its questions at the beginning after the installation process is finished which generally takes only a few minutes you'll see a list of accounts and passwords that were created on your system to facilitate the solution all you have to do is type in the IP address or fully qualified domain name of your server log in with the credentials that were provided and then you can start using it right away and if you're looking for a tutorial that goes over the entire process and goes into even more detail about how to use Chasm I'll be creating a tutorial for that in the future and once it's done I'll leave a card for that video right about here once you've logged in you'll see two tabs at the top the workspaces tab and the admin tab the workspaces tab will show you a list of workspaces that you may currently have installed and the admin tab is where you'll go to configure existing workspaces or launch new ones but then the application is a registry section which presents a list of container-based solutions you can launch as you can see from this list you have everything from Linux distributions to applications that help you achieve a more specific goal for example you can launch a terminal session check your email with Thunderbird create office documents and more if for some reason something that you want to run isn't available within the default registry that comes with Chasm you could also add additional Registries and even run your own container images if you want to and this enables you to extend chasm's functionality even further within the web console there's a great deal of settings and adjustments you could tweak and toggle to make the solution yours for example you could create additional users manage existing sessions run Diagnostics and more while creating workspaces there's a number of adjustments you can make there as well the entire solution is very customizable and you can even hook into ldap if you want that so at this point you might be wondering what should I use Chasm for or perhaps you're wondering if this should replace your existing containerization solution well when it comes to use cases the primary goal of Chasm is to enable you to create and manage individual workspaces each workspace is a container-based solution and the functionality that you get depends on which one you launch for example here I have an alma Linux workspace which I can use for just about any Linux related task that I might need it for you could use a workspace like this for General use cases or maybe something more specific for instance I would use something like this to test Solutions against various Linux distributions if I'm working on an automation solution I might want to test it on Alma Linux tabian or perhaps another distro and this can help me test solutions that I'm working on within different distributions of Linux rather than having to maintain a full virtual machine for each another potential use case is isolation since you could spin up and remove workspaces at will it's easy to create repeatable test environments or even run a full Linux based operating environment within your browser if you're a web developer you can launch individual web browsers as workspaces if you want to test how your code is going to run in each browser or perhaps more simply even if you're not a web developer you can create a new browser workspace for each of your browser sessions and then delete them anytime you want to remove your browsing history but I haven't answered the most important question of all when it comes to Chasm can you run Doom well yeah actually you can as you can see I was able to launch a doom workspace without any trouble at all I mean if you're able to destroy demons within a container-based workspace solution then why not but another thing that you might be wondering is whether or not Chasm can replace your existing container solution obviously that depends on what you want it to run it very well might be the only container-based solution that you'll need for me I decided to run it outside of my current containerization solution which is currently kubernetes however there's no reason why it can't be your only container solution though for me I think it complements my existing solution quite well so I decided to run it alongside kubernetes rather than replace it anyway next let's take a look at pricing and Licensing Chasm is a solution you could download and use for free without the need for an account or to receive endless calls from sales reps this means you can install it on your own Linux server maybe a virtual machine a cloud server or whatever it is that you have without having to pick up the phone and ask for some sort of activation key in fact you won't even have to deal with a contact form before you download it however there are some limitations that you should know about the community version the version that you can download for free is limited to five concurrent sessions also the free version lacks some of the functionality of the paid version such as customized branding the 5K current session limit may be a bit frustrating for some users but for the average home labor it may not be that big of a deal unless you have multiple people that want to use it when it comes to pricing the paid tiers cost five dollars per month and ten dollars per month for the professional and Enterprise tiers respectively on the pricing page on the official Chasm website there's a feature Matrix you can view that will list what you get with each version but for a large portion of my audience the Community Edition is probably good enough overall Chasm is really cool I really enjoyed my time with it and I do recommend it I really like the easy to use user interface and the ability to spin up you know web browsers applications or entire Linux distributions in my web browser is really cool now the only downside I have when it comes to Chasm is the five concurrent session limit which I could kind of understand if you're using someone else's Hardware but if you are self-hosting it I don't really think there should be a limit on how many people can use it since you are putting in the work of setting it up but for the most part I think the five concurrent session limit won't be a big deal for most people but I did want to make sure that you were aware of that anyway what did you guys think let me know your thoughts about Chasm or anything else that you want to chat about in the comments Down Below in the meantime I have a bunch of videos that I have just waiting to be uploaded that I'm editing right now so be sure to subscribe to learn Linux TV to be the first to see those videos as soon as they come out and I'll see you in the next video thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Learn Linux TV

Views: 76,552

Keywords: Linux, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, Learn Linux TV, LearnLinux.TV, Learn Linux, Linux Training, Linux Tutorials, Kasm, Kasm Workspaces, container, remote desktop, linux workspaces, homelab apps, kasm workspaces, desktop as a service, browser isolation, operating system isolation in docker, firefox in docker, operating system in docker, kasm workspaces review, linux tutorial 2023, remote desktop protocol, linux desktop as a service, browser isolation in docker

Id: hXkZVqqAg7c

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2023