I could imagine it almost working as a two-tiered universe. You'll have a lot of thin-client/remote environments used for places where the primary metric is ma

I could imagine it almost working as a two-tiered universe. You'll have a lot of thin-client/remote environments used for places where the primary metric is manageability. Think of how schools love Chromebooks, and places like call centres that simply want users in a bolted down kiosk mode. They don't care if the experience is miserable, but they like the idea that nobody's reading Lemmy. It's going to be a huge hairball for the more advanced user market. Your engineering and graphics and big-data people are going to need special tools with likely complex licensing and setup hassles, mitigating the manageability benefits, and you know there will be a point where hiring a big cloud machine gets pricier than buying an actual workstation. I wonder if some vendors will instead buy into a reduced-version of the concept for distribution though-- instead of ever getting a copy of the bits for AutoCAD or Photoshop, you just get a RDP login to a big machine running it, almost reinventing the X11 paradigm.