Fucking terminals. These are NOT PCs, this are TERMINALS! 1!!
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
457 points (96.2% liked)
Technology
82250 readers
3984 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
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...)
Desktops are just hardware. Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they'll get pretty, too.
Desktops are just hardware.
Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they're sideways are the other properties of that hardware:
-
Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts
-
General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them
What I'm worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they'd like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.
But..
Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they'll get pretty, too.
No desktops means more server options that people use at home. It's still motherboards, RAM, GPU, etc.
Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.
load more comments
(10 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
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.
‘Someone, do something about our problem so we can take advantage of it’
Fuck this is exhausting
"Some adult needs to come fix my problems for me" seems to be super common these days. It's partly why the US is in the state it's in, but certainly not limited to the US.
load more comments
(6 replies)
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?"
load more comments
(36 replies)
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.
load more comments
(7 replies)
You’ll own nothing and be happy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(15 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Please don’t buy this.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
load more comments
(4 replies)
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?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
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?
load more comments
(1 replies)
I look forward to thrifting one in a few years, then installing Linux on it.
load more comments
(7 replies)
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(11 replies)
If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren't entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I'll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
Obviously these are going to be used for corporate or organizational settings, as it what was then with the so-called Network Computer thin clients which Oracle tried promoting but flopped.
load more comments
(2 replies)
If the pc has specs to run something from the cloud it has specs to run a local os.
load more comments
(5 replies)
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.
load more comments
(10 replies)
It's like a Chromebook, but for Windows. Only it doesn't run Windows. Please buy our garbage.
Asus and Dell announce their own Mac Minis but this time with blackjack and hookers.
yeah Im so glad I finally went to linux for my personal computing. Really should have done it about a decade earlier.
view more: next ›