(Originally an issue, but got deleted bc Kasm employees are pussies)
- Kasm, you can kiss my ass, but I'm decompiling Kasm Workspaces because they have the absolute audacity to call themselves open source when Kasm Workspaces is entirely CLOSED source, apart from the containers, which they probably have to be open source to not violate GPL. See https://github.com/kasmweb-decompilation
You heard me, Kasm is full of bullshit. I am absolutely fed up with the direction Kasm is going towards. This is not good for people that FOSS is (usually) aimed for... Hobbyist developers.
-
Anti open source and false claims:
First and foremost, Kasm seems to be advertised as an "open-source" DaaS or desktop-as-a-service solution. I am here to tell you that their claims are absolute bullshit, as they are only open sourcing the BARE MINIMUM of enough to be called "open source" so they can rub it into your face. They are dockerizing their core containers to make it extremely hard to reverse engineer the backend and as a side effect makes it hard to backup the db, and their sourcemaps are extremely large and have an incomprehensible amount of files in said sourcemap to (probably) steer you away from trying to reverse engineer the frontend. Additionally their bold claims of "infinite customizability" is lacking, especially for the free version as it is 600 DOLLARS to just get customizability and the same amount of concurrent sessions as the FREE version. What a scam. -
Incorrect target audience and bad user-friendliness:
Next, Kasm seems to be targeted to businesses with loads of money to blow. There is no clear distinction on the Kasm website that Kasm Workspaces is targeted for people or for corporate businesses. No wonder why Kasm Workspaces licenses are OVER 600 DOLLARS?! This is absolutely diabolical for the average "Joe"[1] as they do not have enough money to afford the most basic license for Kasm Workspaces... Public Kasm Workspaces instances on the Community (aka free) version will be doomed because of ever-growing userbases regardless of how many resources they have for Kasm. I, or the average "Joe" do not have enough money to afford to get a basic suite of customization, extra features not a lot of people really don't care about, and it is another 600 DOLLARS TO INCREASE CONCURRENT SESSIONS???!?! These horrible practices and hefty pricetags may be for corporate, but NOT for the CORRECT target audience, which is for the consumer. This proves that Kasm and Kasm Workspaces are both FAR from being user friendly, especially for the FOSS audience that seems to be discovering Kasm Workspaces which is almost always hobbyist developers, which these developers will probably be trying to make a public and free Kasm Workspaces instance. -
KasmVNC and Kasm containers are hard to use outside of Kasm Workspaces:
I am absolutely fed up with the anti-consumer things Kasm is doing so what if I want to make something similar. That's where my trip with Kasm's containers ends and the journey of making the entire thing from scratch myself starts because Kasm containers are notoriously hard to use, deploy, and proxy outside of Kasm Workspaces. The webserver baked in of KasmVNC seems to refuse legitimate WebSocket connections forcing you to either modify the client/server or ditch using Kasm's absolutely amazing innovation (sarcasm) and painstakingly create your own base Docker containers and to use noVNC, so you can finally proxy your Docker containers using Nginx. Great, Kasm isn't even doing shit that is good for developers. Seems like all of the open source resources from Kasm that you DO get (which is not a lot) isn't being useful even when trying to develop using it, you can only use their stuff with Kasm Workspaces only, so it's essentially useless. Bad CONSUMER experience AND bad DEVELOPER experience? What the fuck are you guys doing? Seems like jacking off and making a mediocre DaaS (or what us proxy devs call a really good "proxy") that only just works on your shit and nobody else's. Why can't we integrate your software into other shit? (Basically anything can do better at integration) Seems like all of this dumbass work is only for the fatass paycheck and not even for a good developer experience filled with vague, hard to fix errors and unhelpful responses from Kasm employees that the COMMUNITY has to answer two weeks after you already found a workaround, which is ditch Kasm entirely and go for the more work intensive route which is remake Kasm to actually be GOOD and not a corporate piece of shit whose goal is solely to make money and have a shitty free version. Fucking piece of shit. -
What should I do?
Sadly ditching Kasm is really hard if you are looking for something that offers similar functionality. I am currently working on an alternative to Kasm Workspaces. Currently called NewDeblok as "Old Deblok" is a (forcefully
) rebranded instance of Kasm Workspaces but I had to reevaluate due to reaching above shitty limits very frequently (this is why I ranted earlier)
- NewDeblok's GitHub, NewDeblok is licensed under GPL-3.0.
- There are virtually zero alternatives to Kasm Workspaces that offer similar functionality. n.eko is an option but I couldn't get it working outside my LAN and N.eko Rooms doesn't provide sufficient functionality that Kasm does.
[1]: The average "Joe" is the average consumer
[2]: A lot of this is based off of MY OWN experience running my own public and free instance of Kasm Workspaces for 4 months.
Do NOT reply with "i ain't reading allat" 😭
stardust coming soon