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The Windows desktop is dying
- warrenm 3y agoVDI makes far more sense for most people It's [effectively] what a Chromebook is
- mydriasis 3y agoBack to dumb terminals? Sounds like a win to me :) why not? Heard something a long time ago that's been stuck in my head ever since -- that 95% of users are probably just using their machines as bootloaders for Google Chrome anyway, so.
- rolph 3y agono, not dumb terminals, more like VM on a locked down TPM device. without connectivity to azure, your terminal wont even be dumb.
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoI wish there was a better Apple-blessed path towards making the iPad a dumb terminal of a Mac Mini. The lack of a nice first party screenshare makes me not bother.
- analog31 3y ago... and Chrome a bootloader for Jupyter Notebook.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago> The Business version starts at $31 per user, per month. For that, you get a 4GB Azure VM with 128GB of storage, along with Microsoft 365 apps, Outlook, and OneDrive. Personally, that's too lightweight for me — the next step up, with 8GB of RAM for $41, sounds much more practical. You're not going to be running too many Electron-based apps with 8GB, or any with 4GB. Is there a gaming edition that actually uses local hardware? We've seen time and time again that the latency is a non-starter for gaming, and Windows is strong there. If MS wants to throw that out, so be it. Save us, Gaben!
- blibble 3y agowow 4gb of ram what I had on my pretty mediocre gaming machine back in 2008
- pmontra 3y agoI could host 8 of those machines on my laptop, 1 core each. Not great in 2008 but not bad. Would users be able to read their Gmail?
- abe_m 3y agoWhen the cost of RAM is on Microsoft's balance sheet, perhaps that will change their priorities for reducing resource consumption of their software.
- tinus_hn 3y agoAlternatively it’s a way to sell bigger subscriptions
- teamonkey 3y ago> Is there a gaming edition that actually uses local hardware? Xbox
- theandrewbailey 3y agoYou mean Xbox Cloud Gaming? Yes, that's a thing now.
- kholdstayr 3y agohttps://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-admits-xbox-has-lost-the-console-wars-as-it-battles-for-69-billion-activision-blizzard-buyout https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-admits-xbox-has-lost-...
- prepend 3y ago$31/month seems so expensive since you’d still need some terminal pc. I think you’re better off just having a literal dumb terminal that only runs office365. If I had to buy a pc and maintain it for employees and then pay $350/year that’s not economical. I think you’re more likely to have some docking station you slide your phone into for a big monitor and keyboard and then just use the browser. That and the UX is going to be horrible.
- mrandish 3y ago> because Microsoft wants your Windows desktop to live in the cloud. That's just never going to be acceptable for me. If the day ever comes there's no choice, I guess I'll keep using the last version that still works 100% locally. I already resent the extra time I have to spend keeping Win10 and Firefox usable against the constant creep of enshittification (<-- a great term by Cory Doctorow), so at least that'll stop when I jump off the upgrade train.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoOr you could, you know, migrate to another OS like Linux or MacOS ;)
- wernercd 3y agobut that would fall into the realm of enshitification. Linux has always been lackluster on the Desktop - fragmented, lacking features, lacking important applications, etc - and MacOS is attached to overpriced mediocrity.
- chambored 3y agoMaybe I’m misinterpreting something, but wouldn’t enshitification require deliberate hamstringing of software to force user changes? I have a hard time seeing that applying to developers of Linux distributions.
- tredre3 3y ago> and MacOS is attached to overpriced mediocrity I'm not a mac user but calling the M1/M2 macbooks overpriced mediocrity is simply ridiculous and shows how out of touch you are.
- deprecative 3y agoSure, but then you get a piece of shit that randomly shuts your USB ports off every few minutes. Why anyone spends money on their products is beyond me.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoIf you need real GPUs, to render 3D surfaces or build or play videogames then old school normal windows has its place and othe options don’t exist. Don’t think it should but I built a PC to use this tech and realized Linux wasn’t an option.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoCan you elaborate on why Linux isn't an option?
- janalsncm 3y agoWhen I was a kid I had a vivid dream of having to watch a car commercial before my computer booted up. I realize now that we are very close to that reality.
- banana_giraffe 3y agoWas your dream inspired by the Free-PC? http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/10/freepc.idg/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/10/freepc.idg/
- 65a 3y agoHoly emachines and netzero flashbacks, batman
- zrobotics 3y agoThat drink a verification can meme is getting closer to reality it seems.
- 47thpresident 3y agoLinus Tech Tips covered a Chinese smart TV [1] that had a preloaded car commercial when you boot it up. The TV was not even connected to the internet, the video file was preloaded from the factory. [1] https://youtu.be/4eSADWuZskk?t=213 https://youtu.be/4eSADWuZskk?t=213
- RGBCube 3y agoI wonder how much it costed to install that ad, like wtf
- baz00 3y agoMicrosoft can simply fuck off if they try and sell me VDI. It's literally the shittiest user experience you can have regardless of who provides it or how it is implemented. Local first, remote sync is fine. Remote first is not!
- ironmagma 3y agoAnyone who’s tried OneDrive knows this has zero chance of not being dead on arrival.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoAnyone who works at a company that's currently migrating to Microsoft 365 knows that it is an inevitability.
- ironmagma 3y agoIt can be both inevitable and DOA.
- rejectfinite 3y agoOneDrive works great now
- kmoser 3y agoExcept when it interferes with other software you install. I've inexplicably had many people unable to get Apache to serve PHP files from local folders that are synced to OneDrive. The only solution was to disable or uninstall OneDrive, which seemed to be installed by default.
- warrenm 3y agoAnyone who uses oneDrive knows that it's more stable than just about any other cloud file sync service out there
- bb88 3y agoIf anything this will kill the cloud. I had the unfortunate pleasure of working on remote windows at { large financial institution }. It was a nightmare. Yes they got a huge immediate cash savings on hardware, but at the cost of worker productivity. The response time from keypress to response was literally like I was in 1992 working with a dialup connection to a terminal server. Oh, also the executives got their own laptops, so they didn't dogfood their own solution.
- alanwreath 3y agoDuuude - it’s like they wanted to make you hate remote. It was the one place I couldn’t stand remote work.
- bb88 3y agoNo. This was on site even! Everything was a lightweight terminal connecting to an oversubscribed cluster. Meanwhile the managers, (I only assume), got huge bonuses out of it.
- rbanffy 3y ago> Oh, also the executives got their own laptops, so they didn't dogfood their own solution. Things like this happen when the person who signs the check is not the person who actually uses the software. Also, no matter the resulting clusterfuck, the project is always successful.
- FpUser 3y agoI've heard it like forever. And I do not really care. Windows did serve me well since it came out and still does. I also use Linux (both desktop and servers). If this FUD article ever materializes I'll just switch to Linux completely.
- i1856511 3y agoIt seems strange to me that you would "move PC to cloud" for mass market users without also removing restrictions that are typically bound to local hardware - RAM for example. If you take it for granted that you want to eschew typical hardware, and deliver experiences over the Internet, is the best way to do that really let someone rent 8GB of RAM in the cloud, and load Chrome and web pages into that cloud ram they rented? and then let the webpages paint in the cloud and draw it for the user over RDP? This makes sense for Microsoft to use their desktop telemetry investments in the cloud era. But less sense for users doing basic productivity.
- warrenm 3y agoInteresting add-on thought: if you combine "cloud painting" with something like Squid, you could have a single (non-cookied) page 'rendered once', and displayed 'for everyone'
- orangecat 3y agoThis is the hopefully-not-inevitable endpoint of the DRM/WEI initiatives. No more worries about pesky users doing things that you don't like, when their "computer" is just a dumb framebuffer that can only show what you stream to it.
- markrages 3y agoNetcraft confirms!
- jasoneckert 3y agoThis article seems like a stretch to me. Microsoft is pushing their online services, and even have a VDI solution, but neither of those things will likely ever cause the Windows desktop to dye by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, having lived through the thin client experiment of the mid 2000s, I can't see VDI ever taking off in the short term, especially at Microsoft's price point either. M365 is brilliant in many ways, but it serves to augment the Windows desktop today, not replace it.
- swozey 3y agoSo I was a Windows Engineer for 5-8 years, I started as an open/freebsd admin but the "windows guy" quit, it was a blur of posh and batch scripts, usually to fix some printer server bs or wipe out someones torrented videos on a SAN. My point is that I noticed Windows machines when I saw them. I'm 39. I started out working (sysadmin) on Win2000. Back when IIS was so terrible it didn't even have a built in URL-rewrite system, you had to pay some 3rd party like $25 to get an IIS extension for it. I had to write my own brute-force detection scripts because there was definitely no Linux bfd service. People would just HAMMER the RDP ports with bad logins and there was NOTHING to mitigate that built in or third party. Change the port from 3889 or whatever? HA! Your Windows customers will never figure out how to log in. Personally as a kid I started with dos 3.0 and then win3.1 blahblah just to play games and encarta. I don't feel like almost ANYONE in my life used Windows as a personal PC. Every single friend/partner I can recall had a Macbook of some sort. I was always jealous because I couldn't afford a Macbook I always had some old Thinkpad. The first macbook I ever actually bought was the new M1 max a couple years ago. I have a Windows 11 desktop with a 4090 rtx in it I use for games once a month. I don't mind or hate Windows. In fact it has the best windows management (pop left/right/up/down) system I've ever used. I remember everyone going insane for Win 95 but I just don't ever see the actual market now. My last 3-5 jobs everyone but maybe a couple of people in sales had Macbooks..
- eipi10_hn 3y ago> I don't feel like almost ANYONE in my life used Windows as a personal PC. Every single friend/partner I can recall had a Macbook of some sort. Let me guess. You live in US, right? Or at least, western countries?
- swozey 3y agoYep USA. But I used to work for SUSE and they were massively prevalent in the EU which I found interesting. They aren't popular here at all.
- eipi10_hn 3y agoExactly as I thought. Every time I see someone saying "Everyone around me uses (some-Apple-products) here", I just show it to my friend/colleague: "Bet you. An American." , and it's true 99% of the time. Here in Asia, Africa... the number of macbooks as personal computers is so small. Right here in Vietnam I'm sitting at a coffee shop with about 10 customers with laptops. 9 are windows, and 1 is macbook. At my lab in Korea with about 30 people when I was studying master there, about 3 or 4 of them use macs. It's a bit funny.
- squarefoot 3y agoThis is how IT worked 40+ years ago: a central server hosting everything (applications+data) surrounded by dumb terminals that would turn into doorstops if the network connection with the server failed for any reason. This approach made sense back then because of the enormous cost of hardware, but technology advancement and reduction in prices soon allowed more modern models like the personal computer which uses the network connection when available but it's not dependent on it, giving the user a lot more freedom. Then corporate greed discovered they can turn everything into a pay per use model to maximize profits, which of course mean they must lock both apps and users data then ask for money to open them, until of course they go out of business, the server is hacked or they simply decide to raise prices. The cloud based SaaS approach is how corporations are throwing down the toilet decades of advancement in the IT just because of greed. Just say no.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> This is how IT worked 40+ years ago: It is also how it worked 20-10 years ago: it was called Terminal Services. And then it was neglected because next shiny thing: VDI. The thing is, one big server for a hundred office users doesn't cost much, because they are sharing the RAM. But with VDI you need at least 100 x 4Gb memory and that means you need way more than one server. And some SAN, because only SAN with fast drive can survive the morning boot storm. Oh, by the way, here are two FC SAN switches for your HA storage fabric, because you really want paths to the SAN be redundant. But anyway, local installs are not bringing revenue constantly. But renting the services do. This was perfectly clear with AzureAD and Exchange 365.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoNot dead yet, my consulting business is almost entirely built around provisioning terminal servers as small private cloud managed systems for companies with niche business requirements. Not sure how much longer the model is going to work because eventually I suspect Microsoft will simply kill off on-prem terminal services all together or make it completely uncompetitive with their own azure / Office 365 combination. But the surfeit of stupendously powerful white box server platforms and the remarkably efficient way that a terminal server conserves memory usage across sessions compared to containers or vdi or anything else, absolutely outperforms almost every other solution in the SMB space, in terms of how each support engineer can scale to 100 or more end users across a half dozen completely unrelated organizations. I'm surprised how underrepresented this business model is these days.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI can't believe that Microsoft is missing the most obvious market here: DRM for business software. Think about it. High-end CAM software (MasterCAM) can easily cost $10K or more per seat. If you want modules for, say, a 5-axis, it can be as much as $35K per seat. SolidWorks will happily charge $4K per seat, minimum. And of course, people complain when their SolidWorks license doesn't work well on their Integrated Graphics and Core i3-4100U; or whatever old systems they are trying to run it on. So much work to fix all the bugs and quirks with old hardware... ... or, just announce that SolidWorks or MasterCAM now run online. With good cloud-based hardware. The subscription makes it more universally affordable, provides service revenue the investors love, there's no more energy spent supporting old hardware and low-end systems, and piracy is dead which the investors also love.
- eointierney 3y agoI reckon desktops have been dying for a long time, and I love me a good desktop. After many years of enlightenment16 on underpowered (scavenged) computers KDE Plasma became my desktop of choice. It still is. Nowadays it's a choice between a browser and an editor for all but multimedia editing and gaming. So emacs and firefox work really well. I still use a desktop environnment for convenient interface with system settings such as wifi networks, window placement, power management and the like, but otherwise KDE disappears into the background as it should. But, as I explore the wonders of NixOS these settings are more and more becoming declaratively controlled by a simple collection of assci files, and it's wonderful. As soon as emacs becomes multithreaded I'm switching to EXWM. And then my desktop enviroment will be fully subsumed. I reckon this combination will eventually become ubiquitous as everyone will become some kind of a programmer, and Richard Stallman will be proven correct. Apple, Google, and Microsoft, will suddenly realise there is no lunch and everyone else will eat computation more happily and healthily. Though in the long run Guix will be more nutritious than NixOS. The desktop metaphor will become a kind of ancient poetry we explore for semiotic curiosities as we forge new pathways for collaborative thinking. And we will always deploy the lambda calculus on the Von Neumann architecture, even when quantum computing is ubiquitous, because we need metaphors, because computing will always be a kind of poetry. So long, and thanks for all the shells.
- zrobotics 3y agoI think I just watched an interview with you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc https://youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc
- jeegsy 3y agoThat was hilarious. The best comedy is that which rings true
- eointierney 3y agoYou are very kind :)
- rbanffy 3y agoSomething similar could be an interesting idea - imagine a system like Boxes, but only some of the programs start as local Xen guests. Most of the heavy lifting is done on beefy remote machines hosting thinly provisioned VMs or containers. It'd be the embodiment of Sun's slogan, "the network is the computer".
- pie_flavor 3y agoThe same technology was debuted in Windows 10, and in Windows 8. Same silly articles said that it was the future of Windows and you wouldn't be able to use a real desktop anymore, as though Microsoft had just up and forgot about the billion Windows machines that don't have good internet access and the billion more that don't have any at all. But if you write an article wailing that Microsoft is going to ruin your computer and steal your cat, you get clicks. Speaking of things that are dying.
- forinti 3y agoThis makes a lot of sense for businesses, even though it seems absurd for home users. A third of my IT department works just to maintain Windows infrastructure for end users.
- catboybotnet 3y agoTime is a flat circle; instead of thin clients, it'll be chromebooks and chromeboxes.
- mikewarot 3y agoAt the point Windows 10 no longer works, I'm going back to either Windows 2000 Server, or Windows 7. I'll sit behind a router with IPv6 turned off, and should be reasonably safe. I moved to Linux last year, but had to revert to Windows 10 because of WikidPad glitches. The old (compiled) Windows version works great, but because of breaking changes in WxWindows, all of the dialog boxes are broken in Linux, and there's no old compiled version to revert to. That's the weakness of depending on source code.
- ahartmetz 3y agoMight want to try the Windows version with Wine.
- water9 3y agoWindows has way too much going on in the background that I can’t possibly feel secure when running the system. Windows 11 feels like active spyware.
- westcort 3y agoYes it does. I don’t remember agreeing to have my computer files backed up to OneDrive. Then, one day, they just were.
- raxxorraxor 3y agoThis is why you don't create a MS account. At some point they always get you. Same on any mobile OS, which are a tragedy for themselves.
- water9 3y agoYes, I found personal pictures from years ago suddenly appear on a work OneDrive. The entire Microsoft accounts ecosystem is such a cluster fuck I don't think they could have designed an easier system to get phished in. It's like they never conceive of the idea that some people don't have the luxury of having a different laptop for all my personal and professional needs. This makes comingling data WAY to easy. IOS is also bad at this.
- Tozen 3y agoCloud PC is so wonderful, as people give Microsoft perpetual access to all their data and any secrets (mi casa es tu casa), at a much higher yearly cost. Brilliant! Wonder if Microsoft will find ways to double-dip, and transfer portions or sell their user's data to various governments or businesses, as they please for profit.
- __warlord__ 3y agoCrazy idea, let me run a Windows VM on Azure from my Xbox.
- warrenm 3y agonot crazy - why shouldn't you be able to?
- dangus 3y agoThe title of the article and the contents don’t match. This is just a virtual workstation product being made available for consumers. It isn’t killing the Windows desktop, it’s offering a solution to someone who needs a cloud thin client.
- rekabis 3y agoYou cannot rip built-in, purposefully-added spyware out of a cloud-based OS like you can with Windows 10 & 11. I still have a few apps that keep me tied to Windows, but it looks like I need to find ways to replace them or move beyond them within the next half a decade.
- turpialito 3y agoWhat about 3rd-world countries with poor or no internet access?
- greatgib 3y agoMake no mistake thinking that it is for technological reason or giving better features! It is just a way for them to switch you to full saas and bring able to better milk you. It would be the holy grail for them.
- jonnypotty 3y agoI'd rather kill myself than pay Microsoft $41 a month for windows 11 - let alone windows 12, whatever amazing pile of shit that turns out to be - especially when it CANT respond in less than 100ms to anything. My god. At least it means someone will have to do something better.