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.Plasma is great, I’m loving Kubuntu.
Even Steam works perfectly fine.
The only games I can’t play are games that install rootkits that I don’t want anyway. Now I don’t have to explain to people that I don’t want malware on my PC and can just say “Ah, shucks, can’t play, Linux” 10/10 recommend.
If the pc has specs to run something from the cloud it has specs to run a local os.
I see this going nowhere
For a few hundred bucks I have a mini PC with which I can do anything I want
This thing, even at half price, would only allow office365, with monthly payments.
Who the fuck would want that and not just spend a few bucks more and have an actual computer?
So a thin client?
Fuck you MS
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
Apparently my job will be getting rid of our personal local network drives (we each have our own only we can connect to) and moving that to Microsoft one drive. Our IT guy hates the new changes, but the orders come from way above. Not sure how well it will work…
Don’t worry, to make it work,he’ll only need to open the firewall to the Internet for dozens of MS subdomains and thousands of IP’s in ranges that can randomly change from day to day. Totally more an issue for systems which might have been segregated from the Internet before!
/s
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
Businesses will adore this. I can guarantee a lot of us will be forced to use these at work, like Teams and CoPilot.
I used to work at a thrift store a decade ago, it was pretty common for people to drop off laptops (some of them pretty sick at the time), I’d ask why and the response was always “we have ipads”. I doubt things have improved since then.
Business’s will not adore this. Cloud PCs in M365 or Azure cost money, often as much per year as it would cost to just purchase a pc to begin with.
So do all the Microsoft subscriptions they already buy, yet they’re extremely popular anyway?
yeah Im so glad I finally went to linux for my personal computing. Really should have done it about a decade earlier.
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?
It was never crazy and people were predicting this since the 90s. It’s essentially a return to the dumb terminal & mainframe paradigm that was in use prior to desktop pcs.
This is horrifying in that it signals a concerted push towards getting consumers on cloud computing.
But in terms of self hosting your own computer 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 box. 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?
Google calls it a Chromebox.
And in the 80’s we called them X Terminals.
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 did since it was online. It’s closed and online, the OS “owner” are the only true admin. If it’s closed and online, your “commands” are just “suggestions” compared to theirs.
Especially for businesses. At work you’ll have no choice but to use something like this.
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.
They’ve been pushing the thin client for years
I think it’s been decades at this point, and I hope it never takes off.
They need to lower the price of the hosted desktops then, it’s still way more cost effective over time to buy a laptop/desktop for a 3 years cycle than to rent a monthly virtual desktop. The only business that wants it are opex obsessives that hate any capex.
gamers or content creators
I can totally see them targeting those demographics as well, cloud gaming has been kinda popular in the last few years. Content creators could be sucked in with promises of getting pro performance without the price, possibly bundled with creative software.
It’s never taken off because of relatively inexpensive and abundant hardware. But these will be attractive to people who need something now and want something inexpensive.
Grandparents are the immediate target but eventually if they force the hardware supply shortages soon some people will need something.
Imagine students with low budget.
The next 5 years are going to be really interesting.
Grandparents don’t want to rent shit. They want to buy it and be done. Source: this old fuck right here.
Fair. But what of they completely eliminate the ability to buy hardware like only selling to the AI fucks? Do grandparents not get phone plans for example?
In general, we try to avoid recurring payments, whether debt, rent, or what have you. When we can’t, we can’t. But we’ll buy used, we’ll do whatever we can to avoid this shit — generally. So in my opinion which is undoubtedly a bit self-serving and should be taken with a grain of salt, grandparents aren’t going to just roll over and accept computer as a service. The market for own your own computer will always be there, and so someone will sell it.
It must me noted that Big Tech is currently engaged in artificially forcing hardware prices upward, along with Microsoft’s constant attempts to deprecate old hardware by forcing new versions of their OS out of compatibility with it.
There are so many ways they’re actively screwing their customers by making things tangibly worse, and then conveniently showing up to “help” by selling us more of their shit.
Self-hosters will be all over these
They are all such cunts!
