Back 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.
I 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.
> 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!
$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.
> 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.
but 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.
-Game changing integration with my other Apple products (NOBODY else does this)
-Stays out of my way for the most part
-Runs important commercial software like Office365 natively
-UNIX shell right out of the box
-Homebrew is a decent package manager and easy to install
-Emacs key binds for text entry fields across the entire OS
-It's a little thing, but the animations and sounds make it kind of fun to use
It's a bit inflexible, and the UNIX layer could use some love and modernization, I'll give you that, but once you learn to work within the paradigm, I think it's actually a really good OS.
Oh, and you definitely need to install something like Rectangle to get window snapping, I can't go without that after using it on Windows and Linux, but that's easy enough to fix.
> Game changing integration with my other Apple products (NOBODY else does this)
Eh, not really. They do it really well and present it very nicely, but mostly sherlocked and not at all unique. Also, it really stumbles once you throw any non-apple stuff in.
They're not wrong. I've got an M1 14" MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad T14 gen 3. The MacBook is in the cupboard and the ThinkPad does the work. Despite a few rough edges it's a lot more useful and easier to drive. I genuinely prefer windows 11 as well. Less eye poking. Also from the macos side of things, some macos ports of software I use are dire and unusable.
There's more to a computer than hardware. M1 Macs have great performance and battery life but the experience of using OS X is awful. Why pay $1500 for a system with poor multiple monitor support, poor mixed DPI support, no keyboard shortcuts for things such as snapping windows, no ability to name virtual desktops, and so many other problems?
They're absolutely important. They're things I deal with multiple times a day every day.
My work laptop is a Mac. My work workstation is a Linux (Gnome) machine. My personal workstation is a Windows 10 machine (not upgrading until they bring back side taskbar). I own and regularly use a Chromebook. I am familiar with all the major desktop environments and OS X is my least favorite.
Each of these requires me to trust another developer and to renew that trust every time there's an update (which there are a bunch of since Apple actively hates backwards compatibility and requires updates for things to keep working all the time). It requires me to research different options and evaluate which fit my needs, which are likely to continue to be maintained, which are trustworthy, and so on.
It also requires me to be able to install arbitrary software on my Mac, which has not been the case at most employers I've worked for.
.....or I could buy a Windows machine and get that all out of the box.
It also depends on what parent's needs are though. Maybe they are in a situation where being able to install a PCIE card is necessary. With Mac, your only option in that case would be the Pro, which is basically an overpriced Mac Studio with PCIE slots, as Marques Brownlee puts it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2KbwC-s7pY
Edit: as some of the sibling comments are saying, maybe parent was talking about Mac OS itself, not the hardware. Some things in Mac OS leave a lot to be desired IME, e.g. windows tiling (can be solved by installing something like Rectangle but really it should be part of the OS) https://rectangleapp.com/
Sure, 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.
> Linux has always been lackluster on the Desktop - fragmented, lacking features, lacking important applications, etc - and MacOS is attached to overpriced mediocrity.
Honestly, I would agree with that 10 years ago but not anymore.
The we-yfication of clients applications and Electron (ironically) did a lot of good here.
These are numbers pulled out of my Hat, but I would say out of my experience that around:
- 90% of proprietary applications around nowadays are just WebApp or Electron Apps that will just run fine under Linux
- 5-7% are old Win32 apps that will just run like a charm under Wine (ironically, sometimes better than under the last windows version)
- 3-5% are the problematic ones. They are often Microsoft applications (Office365, Teams) or Oracle applications.
The most problematic one I do find currently is Office 365 that never runs properly under Wine (probably on purpose).
Even the game situation improved tremendously with the arrival of Proton.
> - 5-7% are old Win32 apps that will just run like a charm under Wine (ironically, sometimes better than under the last windows version)
And that's totally expected. Unlike WSL1, where a terrible OS pretends to be a good one, a vastly superior OS should have no issue pretending to be an inferior one.
Perhaps disgust, but Wine is not sentient just yet.
This argument isn’t necessarily true, and is one of the reasons why the Xbox 360 couldn’t support backwards compatibility for the original Xbox . The hardware required, for the overhead of emulation was larger than the gap between the Xbox 360 and the original Xbox performance. Eventually they had to recompile from 86 to power PC
My personal experience with both WSL1 and Cygwin, which offer a Linux-like varnish on top of a Windows environment, is that mapping Linux filesystem semantics on top of NTFS result in a sizeable performance hit.
Not enough to make them unusable, of course, but enough perceive.
When Wine does the same, mapping NTFS semantics on top of ext4, there is no such hit - on the contrary, if feels faster.
Yea why is windows so opposed to even reading alternative formats like EXT4? It annoys the heck out of me when multi-billion dollar companies can't provide basic features of compatibility because someone is trying to make a buck on licensing. That's such a myopic approach as opposed to giving it away for free in order to get a more valuable commodity - users.
Hmmm.., is it time for a new word, or maybe Workstation still covers it? But I'm wondering what important applications Linux Desktops are lacking. Facebook? Twitter? GMail? Linux has all those, but those are more phone apps now, aren't they? Is there anything left on modern Desktops?
Adobe anything, Autodesk anything, stuff like that... are those still Desktop apps? They aren't on 90% of the desktops out there. Should the 10% be called Workstations?
Perhaps the "important applications" are MS Office? Or some other MS product forced on you by an employer. But that world seems so... archaic.
Maybe 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.
I like how everybody is giving you shit. Having used all three fairly recently:
The desktop Linux environment has never been worse. With Wayland and High DPI, you're kinda forced to use KDE or Gnome to have a smooth experience. Other desktop environments are either bad at Wayland or bad at DPI scaling. But even the two poster children for Linux desktop environments are plagued by issues. Those are always minor or temporary but sometimes breaking something critically. I've had web pages just put KDE into a loop. Always crashing and then restarting. And that was weeks ago. And this happens every time. The install I had before that with gnome made every DPI scales app blurry. This simply does not happen on Windows.
Regqrsing Macs: I don't trust Apple to not do something stupid either but also at least until the 15 inch MacBook air you either lived with 13 inch or you paid a lot more. Need more than one external screen? That's mbp for you. More ports? Mbp. Better GPU? Mbp. And then we really quickly get into a price range where you are comparing the most expensive Windows machines (which actually have some build quality) vs a mid range 14 inch mbp.
I like the arm machines but I'm personally not convinced that anything past the base model is actually worth it. Especially outside of the high CoL areas of the US. Like, if you compare rent payment per week to the cost of the machine, you can totally see why Macs sell so well in US urban centers.
Ahh I wish I could keep doing that. Just yesterday windows decided to update itself in the middle of the night. Now my laptop is acting really slow even though no process is hogging CPU or ram. Tried removing the update but it's only slightly better. I'm in the middle of resetting it as I type this comment.
It got so bad that a couple of import statements in my jupyrr notebook cell took a minute to finish executing. It used to take barely a couple of seconds just yesterday. If resetting does not work I'll have to try a fresh install. If that doesn't work too it's Linux for me I guess.
The only reason I use windows is cause I play games and I am pretty used to it's UI. Guess it's almost the end of the road with this OS for me
Depending on the game, there's still that classic linux hassle (aka series of hacks you can impress your friends with) that are needed to get some games working, but the number of games supported and working without the hassle is honestly surprisingly good imo. The typical ones that you can expect to cause a headache are the always on live service games with heavy handed DRM.
Depending on the game and its DRM, the SteamOS has been great. A couple of symlinks are required to run some stuff but proton pretty much bridges the divide.
And I have a 2014 desktop PC and did a full reinstall when Windows 10 released in 2015. There have been issues but nothing a windows & driver update + reboot coulnt solve.
>Now my laptop is acting really slow even though no process is hogging CPU or ram
Which games? Have a gander at ProtonDB or WineDB for your regulars. KDE is pretty close to Windows if you want to transfer your knowledge.
If the times comes, please avoid Ubuntu - Nobara (Fedora + gaming tweaks) might be a good choice for you. Debian would be another good choice as a general purpose desktop, and many Ubuntu tutorials/Q&A would work just fine with it. Garuda Arch-based if you want street cred, and uses KDE by default.
Thanks for the suggestion. For now resetting worked. The main reason I haven't switched yet is mostly because I didn't want to go through the hassle of dealing with uefi
I've been using Linux for decades, and I'd regularly attempt to play games every few years.
The most recent time, I was shocked how good it was (with Steam & Proton). The only games I found that didn't work were due to DRM and anti-cheating software.
When 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.
Linus 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.
Microsoft 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.
Except 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.
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.
> 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.
What does that even mean? Pretty sure it was the CTOs idea that cost more than just hanging laptops but ended up really helping the company out during COVID
Yeah I don't know where this guy is coming from, but their set up must have been provisioned in a deliberately suboptimal way or criminally oversubscribed. Unless you're gaming or expecting scrolling at a rock solid 75 HZ+ refresh current gen RDP is almost indistinguishable from running a local desktop over an internal gigabit link.
Even even over a paltry 15mbit consumer grade cable internet uplink it is possible to play full screen YouTube videos in high def over plain vanilla RDP version 8, without even getting into any of the (often quite flaky and at this point highly redundant) Citrix enhancements.
> 75 HZ+ refresh current gen RDP is almost indistinguishable from running a local desktop over an internal gigabit link.
Well.. for starters, it's fast only if your datacenter where the RDP/Citrix server is close to the terminals. If ping time is 100ms round trip, then yeah, it's gonna be slow, and it's going to begin to resemble dial-up.
I was apprehensive at first but actually it's pretty great. I can just turn off my computer at the office and turn it back on at home and get back the same session. I can move to any stations in the building without issues.
I don't need to carry around a laptop so I can go to the office with just my keycard and my wallet. I can buy whatever device I want for myself and use it for work too without actually mixing personal and work related computing at all.
I've heard it costs more than buying new laptops to everyone every year.
>I've heard it costs more than buying new laptops to everyone every year.
If only "costs more" if you look at a pure dollar cost of the VDI infra vs the pure cost of a laptop - yeah, it might be more than a couple hundred $$ for for the infra to manage it every month vs a new $2400 laptop every year
But updates, preferences, personalization, setup time, etc is all handled - on a schedule, in a unified manner, and uniformly for everyone
Except the endgame is the beancounters win. Always.
First phase of a tech rollout gives overly generous hardware, because the end user needs to be won over. Then comes right-sizing because it makes economic sense, and we know things are too generous. Then end users get decoupled from bean counters and the provisioning gets done by a third party corporation, so feedback cycles are broken. At that point, the race to the bottom starts.
I've seen people declare: We provision to the satisfaction of the customer. Which means: If you don't do the effort to complain, all is well. The results is the best people leave, as they won't deal with that. The middlings complain, bothering their managers, so they get labelled troublemakers and are oushed out. The yes men stay and praise the situation. The 9to5ers stay and get paid no matter what, so who cares if msword's text appear multiple seconds after you typed it.
Nothing you're saying is incorrect, but once they moved people to VDI's they then discovered they can cut costs by oversubscribing a cluster.
That CAD program that needs 16 threads for someone to be productive? But if the cluster is oversubscribed you'll get maybe 30% of the performance you need.
Also at a very big BigCo using Citrix Workspaces; experience is decent. Got an 8 core/64 GB RAM VM and it’s pretty snappy for most dev work. The portability is nice compared to lugging a work laptop, and connection doesn’t need a janky VPN client. Using Zoom for VDI with the VDI plugin on my home machine is even smoother than same thing on the thin client in the office.
>Citrix/RDP farm should NEVER be used for cost savings. It is for data control. But bean counters think it saves costs
Except ... it does "save costs"
Allowing BYOD (or eve just supplying a 'basic' device) and connecting only through Horizon (or whatever client of choice you prefer) is a huge savings over managing fleets of laptops, desktops, etc - all with different support cycles, specs, etc
All your management is focused on just one layer - the virtual desktop (and its supporting infrastructure)
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.
I'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.
It 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.
Interesting 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'
This 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.
This 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.
So 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..
Exactly 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.
>My last 3-5 jobs everyone but maybe a couple of people in sales had Macbooks..
And where I work it's all Thinkpads or Dells :)
Office 365 suite + Windows 11 + Defender EDR/S1/Crowdstrike + Intune or other MDM/RMM like Ninja/PDQ is an excellent stack for productivity, management, and security.
For Mac you need the hardware first, then a google workspace or 365 license, then jamf to manage the fleet + S1/Crowdstrike.
But yes for Desktop use it really shines. PC Gaming too is in a better place than ever. Like 500k is on Steam playing BG3 right now.
This 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.
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.
Not 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.
This cycle of alternating didn’t start 40 years ago, which would be 1983. We have been cycling between decentralization and centralization since at least the 1970’s.
Because they both suck, either side “winning” is worse than staying in the middle. But we only like pendulum swinging in this industry so nobody stops as the bottom of the arc.
True, but aren't there far more economical ways of doing it if you're an IT department? Running a full Windows VM with 4G to 8G of reserved memory seems incredibly wasteful if all you want to do is centralise the provisioning and management software and data.
Why not Chromebooks + web apps if you need some client-side hardware anyway?
That's true and one great advantage. But I don't get how to apply this advantage to personal computing. I have a laptop and I never ever wanted to randomly "log into my cloud workstation" from some other place. I can just open the lid of my laptop and continue working. What advantage does the requirement of a persistent network connection offer me? Seems like working on a train is not doable.
I could see a use case where people don't want / can spend to much money on hardware. But even then, hardware is still required and I can't see where a subscription would help here.
I run almost all of my devices as “dumb” terminals for most purposes.
I can work in my office at my workstation. I can walk out to the kitchen and sit down with my laptop and open the lid and be _exactly_ where I just was. I can move across the country and work from my laptop, a friend’s computer, a library, or anything else I run across along the way. My house can burn down and I can go to an electronics store and buy a new laptop and continue typing in the middle of the line where I left off when the smoke detector started beeping and I ran out of the house.
Separating the device I’m using from the work I’m doing makes the friction to move between devices near zero or zero.
I never use my friend's computers, library computers, or anyone else's computers to log into my personal accounts when I can afford to have my own devices. The thought of entering passwords into devices that you don't own and trust horrifies me. Even if someone is trustworthy, their devices could be compromised. Not to mention that it can make your friends uncomfortable if you're borrowing their computers all the time.
It's not like I'm running around living my life on other people's computers. The guy I replied to said he had no idea how to apply this to personal computing to get any advantages. "I spend 90% of my time sitting at my desk, using my desktop, doing normal boring work." isn't really a good demonstration of any advantage.
Most of my work _is_ done from my desktop. The bulk of the remainder is done from my laptop. For that alone I find enough advantage to keep doing it. Zero context lost bouncing around.
But when I _was_ moving across the country, it was certainly nice not having my ability to earn an income any given day tied to a single device. When I was effectively homeless in my month-long move and staying with family at one point I did end up using their computer a couple times. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were okay with it.
I'm not making any assumption. I'm speaking from my personal experience.
Yes, if I'm somewhere without internet I can't get a lot done. But that's true whether I'm running programs locally or remotely.
Based on the number of people that show up on HN every time GitHub/GitLab/etc go down, I don't think I have any unusual dependencies that nobody else does.
At some point, internet connections will be fast enough to make them indistinguishable form a local machine. Today, that is not true.
In my own job, I straddle cloud-based and local machine-based software. Overwhelmingly, the cloud-based software is slow to the extent that it removes at least 40 points of IQ and offsets a decade of experience. The intellect and mental speed I have spent a lifetime building are simply washed away by latency that shuts my mind down, effectively turning me into a ninth-grader. Sure the company pays me as if I continue to generate output becoming of my generous salary. But I maintain the illusion simply by spending many hours on weekends with copious amounts of coffee and, at times, gin, doing work on cloud-based software that, on the "outdated" local software, used to take minutes.
Cloud software is among the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the American consumer.
I play PC and VR games on ShadowPC. I can’t tell the difference with a controller, and the latency with a keyboard and mouse is like a cheap Bluetooth mouse. I think the key for these is relatively local data centers.
Once ISPs cohost, or get in on the game themselves, we’re set!
Having the database on the same server as the application significantly improves responsiveness of applications.
Many of these cloud applications choose fragmentary architectures with data sprinkled across many discreet servers that are milliseconds or tens of milliseconds away from each other, resulting in significant delays compared to doing these blocking operations against a local database.
Cloud native isn't always the right choice, sometimes CRUD apps should have a local database just for the responsiveness benefits.
This here. Everyone talks like bandwidth is what's lacking. The reality is latency is the problem and you can't overcome the physics (currently). MS's cloud PC's can get stuffed.
During my summer trainship, accounting was run on an AS/400 used by dumb terminals on the harbour offices.
At the university we had DG/UX, Solaris and eventually Red-Hat Linux, with a mix of classical phosphor and green terminals, PC and classical Macs (LC models).
At Nokia and CERN we used to develop on UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, Scientific Linux) servers, PC and Macs were only used for Office and as thin clients for the R&D servers.
And then we moved into Citrix, RDP and Terminal Services for Windows development, so it has been with us all along.
I 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.
I 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.
Something 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".
Yes, but it’d need to be more transparent - as in you’d just launch a program from your default graphical program launcher, and the program itself would automatically select what resources, local and remote, would be used.
The 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.
At 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.
Yes, 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.
Cloud 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.
156 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadIt's [effectively] what a Chromebook is
without connectivity to azure, your terminal wont even be dumb.
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!
what I had on my pretty mediocre gaming machine back in 2008
Xbox
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.
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.
Linux has always been lackluster on the Desktop - fragmented, lacking features, lacking important applications, etc - 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.
M1/M2 are hardware. MacOS is software. As far as operating systems go MacOS is very much mediocre.
The comment he was replying to saids that MacOS is "attached to overpriced mediocrity". It seems pretty clear that is talking about hardware.
-Relatively secure
-Game changing integration with my other Apple products (NOBODY else does this)
-Stays out of my way for the most part
-Runs important commercial software like Office365 natively
-UNIX shell right out of the box
-Homebrew is a decent package manager and easy to install
-Emacs key binds for text entry fields across the entire OS
-It's a little thing, but the animations and sounds make it kind of fun to use
It's a bit inflexible, and the UNIX layer could use some love and modernization, I'll give you that, but once you learn to work within the paradigm, I think it's actually a really good OS.
Oh, and you definitely need to install something like Rectangle to get window snapping, I can't go without that after using it on Windows and Linux, but that's easy enough to fix.
Eh, not really. They do it really well and present it very nicely, but mostly sherlocked and not at all unique. Also, it really stumbles once you throw any non-apple stuff in.
LTspice, Maxima and O365 are horrible on macos.
My work laptop is a Mac. My work workstation is a Linux (Gnome) machine. My personal workstation is a Windows 10 machine (not upgrading until they bring back side taskbar). I own and regularly use a Chromebook. I am familiar with all the major desktop environments and OS X is my least favorite.
* https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/displaylink-dual-displa...
** https://rectangleapp.com/
*** https://github.com/dado3212/spaces-renamer
**** https://contexts.co/
***** https://github.com/dbalatero/SkyRocket.spoon
It also requires me to be able to install arbitrary software on my Mac, which has not been the case at most employers I've worked for.
.....or I could buy a Windows machine and get that all out of the box.
Edit: as some of the sibling comments are saying, maybe parent was talking about Mac OS itself, not the hardware. Some things in Mac OS leave a lot to be desired IME, e.g. windows tiling (can be solved by installing something like Rectangle but really it should be part of the OS) https://rectangleapp.com/
Honestly, I would agree with that 10 years ago but not anymore.
The we-yfication of clients applications and Electron (ironically) did a lot of good here.
These are numbers pulled out of my Hat, but I would say out of my experience that around:
- 90% of proprietary applications around nowadays are just WebApp or Electron Apps that will just run fine under Linux
- 5-7% are old Win32 apps that will just run like a charm under Wine (ironically, sometimes better than under the last windows version)
- 3-5% are the problematic ones. They are often Microsoft applications (Office365, Teams) or Oracle applications.
The most problematic one I do find currently is Office 365 that never runs properly under Wine (probably on purpose).
Even the game situation improved tremendously with the arrival of Proton.
And that's totally expected. Unlike WSL1, where a terrible OS pretends to be a good one, a vastly superior OS should have no issue pretending to be an inferior one.
Perhaps disgust, but Wine is not sentient just yet.
My personal experience with both WSL1 and Cygwin, which offer a Linux-like varnish on top of a Windows environment, is that mapping Linux filesystem semantics on top of NTFS result in a sizeable performance hit.
Not enough to make them unusable, of course, but enough perceive.
When Wine does the same, mapping NTFS semantics on top of ext4, there is no such hit - on the contrary, if feels faster.
Adobe anything, Autodesk anything, stuff like that... are those still Desktop apps? They aren't on 90% of the desktops out there. Should the 10% be called Workstations?
Perhaps the "important applications" are MS Office? Or some other MS product forced on you by an employer. But that world seems so... archaic.
The desktop Linux environment has never been worse. With Wayland and High DPI, you're kinda forced to use KDE or Gnome to have a smooth experience. Other desktop environments are either bad at Wayland or bad at DPI scaling. But even the two poster children for Linux desktop environments are plagued by issues. Those are always minor or temporary but sometimes breaking something critically. I've had web pages just put KDE into a loop. Always crashing and then restarting. And that was weeks ago. And this happens every time. The install I had before that with gnome made every DPI scales app blurry. This simply does not happen on Windows.
Regqrsing Macs: I don't trust Apple to not do something stupid either but also at least until the 15 inch MacBook air you either lived with 13 inch or you paid a lot more. Need more than one external screen? That's mbp for you. More ports? Mbp. Better GPU? Mbp. And then we really quickly get into a price range where you are comparing the most expensive Windows machines (which actually have some build quality) vs a mid range 14 inch mbp.
I like the arm machines but I'm personally not convinced that anything past the base model is actually worth it. Especially outside of the high CoL areas of the US. Like, if you compare rent payment per week to the cost of the machine, you can totally see why Macs sell so well in US urban centers.
It got so bad that a couple of import statements in my jupyrr notebook cell took a minute to finish executing. It used to take barely a couple of seconds just yesterday. If resetting does not work I'll have to try a fresh install. If that doesn't work too it's Linux for me I guess.
The only reason I use windows is cause I play games and I am pretty used to it's UI. Guess it's almost the end of the road with this OS for me
Depending on the game, there's still that classic linux hassle (aka series of hacks you can impress your friends with) that are needed to get some games working, but the number of games supported and working without the hassle is honestly surprisingly good imo. The typical ones that you can expect to cause a headache are the always on live service games with heavy handed DRM.
>Now my laptop is acting really slow even though no process is hogging CPU or ram
Have you rebooted?
Is it thermal throttling?
If the times comes, please avoid Ubuntu - Nobara (Fedora + gaming tweaks) might be a good choice for you. Debian would be another good choice as a general purpose desktop, and many Ubuntu tutorials/Q&A would work just fine with it. Garuda Arch-based if you want street cred, and uses KDE by default.
The most recent time, I was shocked how good it was (with Steam & Proton). The only games I found that didn't work were due to DRM and anti-cheating software.
Don’t think it should but I built a PC to use this tech and realized Linux wasn’t an option.
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/10/freepc.idg/
[1] https://youtu.be/4eSADWuZskk?t=213
Local first, remote sync is fine.
Remote first is not!
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.
Meanwhile the managers, (I only assume), got huge bonuses out of it.
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.
Then COVID hit and all of a sudden we all worked from home exactly the same way. It was a wow moment of how prepared we were comparing to everyone.
Yes, it is never as good as native, but it's not that bad if done properly.
Citrix/RDP farm should NEVER be used for cost savings. It is for data control. But bean counters think it saves costs... and user experience suffer.
Even even over a paltry 15mbit consumer grade cable internet uplink it is possible to play full screen YouTube videos in high def over plain vanilla RDP version 8, without even getting into any of the (often quite flaky and at this point highly redundant) Citrix enhancements.
Well.. for starters, it's fast only if your datacenter where the RDP/Citrix server is close to the terminals. If ping time is 100ms round trip, then yeah, it's gonna be slow, and it's going to begin to resemble dial-up.
> ... or criminally oversubscribed
Yes! and people got bonuses out of it!
I was apprehensive at first but actually it's pretty great. I can just turn off my computer at the office and turn it back on at home and get back the same session. I can move to any stations in the building without issues.
I don't need to carry around a laptop so I can go to the office with just my keycard and my wallet. I can buy whatever device I want for myself and use it for work too without actually mixing personal and work related computing at all.
I've heard it costs more than buying new laptops to everyone every year.
If only "costs more" if you look at a pure dollar cost of the VDI infra vs the pure cost of a laptop - yeah, it might be more than a couple hundred $$ for for the infra to manage it every month vs a new $2400 laptop every year
But updates, preferences, personalization, setup time, etc is all handled - on a schedule, in a unified manner, and uniformly for everyone
First phase of a tech rollout gives overly generous hardware, because the end user needs to be won over. Then comes right-sizing because it makes economic sense, and we know things are too generous. Then end users get decoupled from bean counters and the provisioning gets done by a third party corporation, so feedback cycles are broken. At that point, the race to the bottom starts.
I've seen people declare: We provision to the satisfaction of the customer. Which means: If you don't do the effort to complain, all is well. The results is the best people leave, as they won't deal with that. The middlings complain, bothering their managers, so they get labelled troublemakers and are oushed out. The yes men stay and praise the situation. The 9to5ers stay and get paid no matter what, so who cares if msword's text appear multiple seconds after you typed it.
But the TCO of employee connectivity is not merely "the device"
It's everything else that goes into it
Want a standard developer environment? Create an appropriate VDI instance
Want a standard CAD environment? Create an appropriate VDI instance
Want a standard xyz environment? Create an appropriate VDI instance
Then, based on the user role (at the moment of login), spin-up and connect to the proper image
This also allows someone who does two jobs to connect to multiple VDIs based off work needs, and do the 'proper' work on each one
Sure some of this is about data governance ... but most is about enabling end users to be as productive as possible
Updates? Done offline in offhours just to the master image(s)
New version of $OS$ needs to be deployed/trialed? Build/update one image at a time, verify, then push out as the new Golden Master
That CAD program that needs 16 threads for someone to be productive? But if the cluster is oversubscribed you'll get maybe 30% of the performance you need.
Except ... it does "save costs"
Allowing BYOD (or eve just supplying a 'basic' device) and connecting only through Horizon (or whatever client of choice you prefer) is a huge savings over managing fleets of laptops, desktops, etc - all with different support cycles, specs, etc
All your management is focused on just one layer - the virtual desktop (and its supporting infrastructure)
Everything else is noise
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.
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.
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.
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..
Let me guess. You live in US, right? Or at least, western countries?
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.
Spoken like someone who's never experienced KDE. ;)
And where I work it's all Thinkpads or Dells :)
Office 365 suite + Windows 11 + Defender EDR/S1/Crowdstrike + Intune or other MDM/RMM like Ninja/PDQ is an excellent stack for productivity, management, and security.
For Mac you need the hardware first, then a google workspace or 365 license, then jamf to manage the fleet + S1/Crowdstrike.
But yes for Desktop use it really shines. PC Gaming too is in a better place than ever. Like 500k is on Steam playing BG3 right now.
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.
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.
VARs are living on %% of the sale.
> Not dead yet
Yep, but only yet.
Because they both suck, either side “winning” is worse than staying in the middle. But we only like pendulum swinging in this industry so nobody stops as the bottom of the arc.
OTOH, you could log off from one terminal and go to any other terminal (maybe in a different country) and continue to work right where you left.
If the environment is designed for that, it's not only doable, but practical.
Why not Chromebooks + web apps if you need some client-side hardware anyway?
Some companies are married to Microsoft Office, Exchange, and ShamePoint.
I could see a use case where people don't want / can spend to much money on hardware. But even then, hardware is still required and I can't see where a subscription would help here.
I can work in my office at my workstation. I can walk out to the kitchen and sit down with my laptop and open the lid and be _exactly_ where I just was. I can move across the country and work from my laptop, a friend’s computer, a library, or anything else I run across along the way. My house can burn down and I can go to an electronics store and buy a new laptop and continue typing in the middle of the line where I left off when the smoke detector started beeping and I ran out of the house.
Separating the device I’m using from the work I’m doing makes the friction to move between devices near zero or zero.
Most of my work _is_ done from my desktop. The bulk of the remainder is done from my laptop. For that alone I find enough advantage to keep doing it. Zero context lost bouncing around.
But when I _was_ moving across the country, it was certainly nice not having my ability to earn an income any given day tied to a single device. When I was effectively homeless in my month-long move and staying with family at one point I did end up using their computer a couple times. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were okay with it.
Yes, if I'm somewhere without internet I can't get a lot done. But that's true whether I'm running programs locally or remotely.
Based on the number of people that show up on HN every time GitHub/GitLab/etc go down, I don't think I have any unusual dependencies that nobody else does.
In my own job, I straddle cloud-based and local machine-based software. Overwhelmingly, the cloud-based software is slow to the extent that it removes at least 40 points of IQ and offsets a decade of experience. The intellect and mental speed I have spent a lifetime building are simply washed away by latency that shuts my mind down, effectively turning me into a ninth-grader. Sure the company pays me as if I continue to generate output becoming of my generous salary. But I maintain the illusion simply by spending many hours on weekends with copious amounts of coffee and, at times, gin, doing work on cloud-based software that, on the "outdated" local software, used to take minutes.
Cloud software is among the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the American consumer.
Once ISPs cohost, or get in on the game themselves, we’re set!
Many of these cloud applications choose fragmentary architectures with data sprinkled across many discreet servers that are milliseconds or tens of milliseconds away from each other, resulting in significant delays compared to doing these blocking operations against a local database.
Cloud native isn't always the right choice, sometimes CRUD apps should have a local database just for the responsiveness benefits.
Has latency really improved that much lately? At least for gaming latency has been more or less constant for me over the last ~10 years or so.
And if the server is in the same city or quite close to you I think it’s already possible but possibly not that useful.
At the university we had DG/UX, Solaris and eventually Red-Hat Linux, with a mix of classical phosphor and green terminals, PC and classical Macs (LC models).
At Nokia and CERN we used to develop on UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, Scientific Linux) servers, PC and Macs were only used for Office and as thin clients for the R&D servers.
And then we moved into Citrix, RDP and Terminal Services for Windows development, so it has been with us all along.
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.
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.
A third of my IT department works just to maintain Windows infrastructure for end users.
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.
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.