It's pretty reliable except when the power goes out at home or something like that. I use Tailscale to get around the NAT on the router.
My big computer is behind an ADSL connection where the uplink is pretty slow. If I am changing windows it can take a few seconds for the window to update but once the window is up it is reasonably responsive to type into PyCharm. If I spun up a machine in us-east-2 and used it over a gigabit connection it would be very fast.
Recently my 2013 Mac Mini crapped out and the keyboard fascia of my Alienware laptop delaminated so I swapped in the Alienware for the Mac Mini so I don't really have a laptop I want to travel with. I am not sure what I will get to replace it and when; I've got some desire for a laptop for "hacking" such as connecting to a WiFi CAN bus dongle in my car or to go to an electronics club and program my Arduino. I haven't really decided what it's going to be yet.
Have you considered getting a virtual private server from someplace like digital ocean or MS Azure or whatever? You might find that preferable for something to RDP into.
I’ve done it at times. In EC2 I’d probably want something like a M7i.8xlarge which would cost around $0.80 an hour for on demand pricing, which would be a good deal because I’d only actually spin it up when I was using it. (I use to go to hackathons with an Amazon Fire tablet back when Android has mouse support and the iPad didn’t and having a $10 cloud bill is cheap for having the sleekest bit of kit that anybody brings.)
The thing is I do most of my software dev on a “gaming PC” I built myself that has a good graphics card. My RSS reader YOShInOn runs when I am awake and as a web app it is super responsive on my tablet. I just drank a coffee at the gas station and I am tapping this out on my iPad right now. It’s really convenient to use this machine even if I do have a moment sometimes when I’m not sure if the window I picked will open and have to suppress the urge to click again (which could make the window go away!)
How do you find this in practice?
For example, do you have random connection errors, or latency issues?
And have you tried connecting from another country? Or are you always physically close to the main device?