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Goodbye local Windows, you mean. Except I said goodbye two years ago and never looked back or missed it. Windows does nothing I need, and does it poorly.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure, but ultimately I don't care all that much.
I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure
I hope this is effort is a miserable failure ... because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.
Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they'll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a "cheap" monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they'll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware...)
(Especially when a cheap thin client with a "cheap" monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
Right now, one year of Microsoft 365 costs a full hundred dollars... and there is still a strong desktop market.
If you're right that the tech industry is willing to price consumers out of personal computers - and it looks like they are - I can only imagine what will happen to those subscription prices.
Ah yes, it's around the time for thin clients of this cycle.
It's funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.
I'm sure we did a cycle of network booting thin clients and windows terminal services about 10 or 15 years ago. 🤔
You’ll own nothing and be happy.
Buy all the ram, inflating prices. Sell thin clients and access to computing power/ram. What a scam.
And when your Internet goes down, you can't even work locally.
Genius!
I'm sure CoPilot in the cloud already took that into account though and goes off on all sorts of tangents with the user disconnected.
What could possibly go wrong?
"Don't you guys have internet?"
I'm so sick of Microsoft I actually installed Fedora KDE Plasma.
Genuinely, it's nicer than windows lol
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying, but overall it works really well, has more features and looks slick.
Ain't ever going back.
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying
I was on windows since 3.1, dual booted various distros of Linux the past 15 years, and removed windows from my computers over a year ago.
I would have to crawl forums to find fixes for stupid shit in windows once in awhile, less than Linux 15 years ago, but more than Linux in the lead up to getting rid of it. The thing that really pissed me off was the most egregious issues with win10/11 that id be looking for solutions to would always be changed back on the next update.
I look forward to thrifting one in a few years, then installing Linux on it.
You can be sure that planned obsolescence can be done much easier on these kind of hardware. One tweak from the backend and "oops, looks like Microslop 365 OS can't run your thin client"
I'm really worried about this, I don't think it'll become a universal standard by all means but I can see Microslop forcing this onto people as a kinda next step from all the hardware limitation bs.
They would finally have total control over your OS.
They've been pushing the thin client for years and it's never taken off. You and I wouldn't be the target for this machine and neither would gamers or content creators. This is for business or grandparents.
What in the name is the flying spaghetti monster is Windows 365? An even less private version of windows that won't work is you don't have internet?
The OS is fully running on the cloud. You will be given a VM. Everything stays there. You may have to take permission to download a file from the VM onto your local device. You don't get any choice about telemetry.
Unless the pc is free, why the fuck would anyone use it?
Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can't be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with ~~no~~ fewer intrusive ads.)
Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.
Something similar to this concept is great for enterprise environments. Imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client that just connects to a "mainframe" of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee's thin client. That is already a widespread concept. But for a home PC, with that VM being run on the OS manufacturer's servers? No, I don't think anybody should want to pay for that.
You just described Citrix whole business model
God. I can't believe it. I've lived long enough to see the return of the dumb terminal. FFS.
Someone will install Linux on them and use them as a cheap barebones computer. I'm sure with a bit of jiggery-pokery they can be repurposed to something useful.
These definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.
You say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don't get to install a custom OS, unless you're lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don't get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.
We are absolutely entering this nightmare phase.
Our best hope is that companies outside the US stop buying Microsoft. People will need to produce computers for them. Then we in the US can import them and run Linux.
It is a Thinnet client. They have been around for at least 26 years.
Walk into any office or business that runs off the cloud or a local server and they will likely have dozens.. I mean dozens of these lying around.
I know the gaming community looks at these like a vampire looks at a rosary but it isn’t new tech or even a new concept.
Back in 2008-2009 I shared this crazy idea with my peers that Microsoft was moving towards an "always connected" OS that would probably be hosted on their servers, because you can make more money charging someone for access to their data than charging them once for their OS.
they laughed it off and told me that nobody would fall for that.
....who's laughing now assholes?
This is horrifying in that it signals a concerted push towards getting consumers on cloud computing.
But in terms of self hosting your own compute these actually look great, especially if they’re subsidized to get you into a subscription fee. As long as we can break into the bootloader and run Linux on these, they look to be very capable and efficient small compute boxes. 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, DDR5 memory, and Intel N series processors?
Self hosters and homelabbers will be licking their lips.
These fuckers themselves have increased the price of PC components and now they have the gall to release this cloud-only PC to "alleviate the problem of the current market scenario".
I have a sneaking suspicion that these PCs will have some sort of protection so that nothing other than Win365 can run. Maybe a locked bootloader/secureboot?
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
So a thin client?
Yes. You run windows remotely, probably through that 2.5G ethernet.
I'd rather be struck by lightning than use cloud computing through Wi-Fi.
If the pc has specs to run something from the cloud it has specs to run a local os.
yeah Im so glad I finally went to linux for my personal computing. Really should have done it about a decade earlier.
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
