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.That’s not the worse. The worse is when every goddamn awful thing in your paid-for OS is to be solvable with a time consuming sfc /scannow and another command which always take lots of tine.
I almost consider those [non-working but always peddled first] worse than a greybeard telling you can solve your [Linux] problem fetching the source of 10 packages from git and compiling manually.
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.
Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)
I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.
I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)
Garuda is a great and very polished Arch distro. The bling in their riced themes is not so great for old machines, but a recent one has no issue. The documentation and community is also pretty good. Their dotfiles and choice of terminal tools were also great.
Plasma is great, I’m loving Kubuntu.
Fucking terminals. These are NOT PCs, this are TERMINALS! 1!!
40 year loop back to Wyse
Wyse never went away. They’re owned by Dell and continue selling thin clients to this day. The only difference here is that dell isn’t using their branding on these machines for some reason.
And when your Internet goes down, you can’t even work locally.
Genius!
I’m sure CoPilot in the cloud already took that into account though and goes off on all sorts of tangents with the user disconnected.
What could possibly go wrong?
“Don’t you guys have internet?”
Considering this is very clearly targeted enterprise, there’s probably some sector of a company that works on data that’s only in the cloud anyways. They’re likely the ones asking for this. I highly doubt this would become a norm across the enterprise.
yes but how often does your internet go down? I agree with the sentiment and I hate this but we should think about this from an average user perspective when we make our argument. Internet doesnt go down, I’ve had more electricity outages than internet outages in the past 5 years. if you live in a city its a rare thing.
The reason why people shouldnt want this in my opinion is not because its day to day worse but because its worse long term. These companies will offer it at a low price to entice you then yank the rug out from under you. You will never be safe with an option like this because at any time it can be taken from you and one day there might not be an alternative market of computers to purchase.
Congratulations. My home internet was down the whole day yesterday. My power goes out at least once or twice per month due to the current nature of the power line structure. I live in Europe.
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
I live in (Eastern) Europe.
This product is aimed at people who live in places with reliable infra. (no offense intended)
Name a single country with no power outages
You do realise power outages affect regular PC users and cloud PC users all the same.
And yet, most consumers use laptops with build in batteries. A power outage doesn’t stop them dead most of the time. It will for Windows 365 users. You’re doing an awful lot of sugar coating for someone that claims to be against this product.
I can’t work on a laptop. Might as well just use a shitty tablet instead. I’ll use a desktop PC, thank you very much.
Also, in the last 20 years I have experienced 2 power outages. One took about 3 hours to fix, which was spooky but also very cool, the other was in January this year and lasted for about 30 minutes. It’s really not a problem.
8 days ago when Cloudflare bunked up my ISP.
If thats happening you got bigger problems
It’s especially in those situations (like with climate warming, increasing political unrest and top-down control) that you want a working system. And also that connectivity is one of the first things to go down.
You realise that windows already does this and you can still work without internet. The way the sign in tokens works does not require 100% internet connection.
I hate the idea of a cloud OS but I also dont care about society collapsing as an argument.
yes but how often does your internet go down?
I have a 1Gb connection. I work in software development. I live in a nice neighbourhood. My internet goes down all the time.
I live in a major city that’s been carved up by the local monopolists like a turkey, and none of them have even installed coverage in all the areas they’ve claimed and which their “competitors” won’t touch. Some people just can’t have a good connection because of their address.
Im sorry to hear that. Maybe this is a product aimed at 1st world countries. Expected downtime for 1st world countries is normally under an hour a year and I think people can live with that.
If your internet is shit you do not need to buy this.
I do live in a 1st world country. I enjoy socialized (free) health care. And actually my country has some of the best internet in the developed world.
Maybe this is a product aimed at 1st world countries.
I guess that rules out the USA.
Expected downtime for 1st world countries is normally under an hour a year
Citation needed.
If your internet is shit you do not need to buy this.
Nobody should buy this.
If your internet is going down all the time it’s definitely not “some of the best in the world”.
My specific issue is a buried line at some point between my house and the next ISP demark. I did say “all the time”, but that was hyperbolic. It only goes down when it rains or when snow is melting, which suggests a cable somewhere is cracked and water gets in and degrades the signal.
It happens maybe once a week in the spring, and is back as soon as I reboot the router.
But your assertion that just because a single person’s internet goes down that the entire country’s internet is not “the best” is childish and a reductionist argument.
The dodgy WiFi gear from my fiber provider requires a hard re-set at least once a week. I had to do that just today.
I have no idea how you put up with that. I would not accept that from any ISP router. If my ISP router has any issue I can ship it back for free and receive a brand new one a few days later. There should also be options for bringing your own router.
Fiber gear is a little different and I’d rather deal with this than the bullshit data caps and price hike games with Comcast. 😉
I have fiber, can’t even remember the last time my internet went down. It’s not a fiber thing, it sounds like a shitty hardware thing.
It’s definitely a shitty hardware thing.
yes but how often does your internet go down?
About once a month. Not for very long, but it is an annoyance. Xfinity usually does maintenance between 1am and 2am, and the Internet will be out for about 30 minutes to an hour. About once a year it goes down for at least half a day.
My OS hasn’t gone down at all in 20 years. I don’t want that to change. If an OS stops working for an hour once a month for maintenance, it’s a piece of refried shit.
“Now updating, please wait!”
I mean, technically not “down” but not exactly usable either. 😉
im sorry your ISP is dogshit. I dont think anyone in your area will want to buy this product.
That’s the problem. Comcast is famous in the US for being utter dogshit. So is ATT. And that’s pretty much our choices.
What happens if the local ISP/electrical/whatever decides there need for maintenance?
Not every company can afford redundant high speed internet.Ok your internet goes down for a few hours and life moves on. Its not the end of the world.
Didnt know a company that relies on the internet can just move on lmao.
That could some cost their job. But hey, just move on (งツ)วThey have no choice but to move on. The aws outage took most things offline and everyone moved on. Half the people in this thread say their internet goes down weekly. 99.99999% uptime is a meme that very few companies actually require.
I think your opening statement is getting you down votes.
This tech isn’t aimed at consumers, it is for business users where the business has decided to deploy remote windows servers for their employees.
I wouldn’t want one of these as a daily home pc.
I understand and expect down votes. I am on the same wavelength as most people here. I am just trying to offer some commentary that isnt the same 100x repeated X bad perspective.
I actually asked for something exactly like this at my work a few years ago. I was like why the fuck are we buying 1000 machines when we can run all these desks as VMs off our servers. We didnt end up doing it but I still think its a decent idea for business.
For consumers its a very good value proposition but a horrible trap.
Our best hope is that companies outside the US stop buying Microsoft. People will need to produce computers for them. Then we in the US can import them and run Linux.
‘Someone, do something about our problem so we can take advantage of it’
Fuck this is exhausting
“Some adult needs to come fix my problems for me” seems to be super common these days. It’s partly why the US is in the state it’s in, but certainly not limited to the US.
Its a reality. Why does apple use usb c now? Because someone else got tired of their shit.
What do you expect us to do? I don’t buy anti-consumer products as much as possible and I advise everyone I know to do the same. I explain why things are bad, but most people don’t care enough to listen. On top of that, these companies collude so that all the options end up being anti-consumer bullshit and you’re stuck trying to find the least bad one.
I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?
I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!
Do you say similar about all the corporations and governments who have relied on the US for decades? Hmmm?
Yes. Yes we do. But please fix you god damned country
Yep, spoken like a true American.
corporations
I suppose you mean tech? Many parts of the world offer value for money products. Had it not been the US in anything any corporation needs, someone else will step up.
Besides which most corporations rely on China more than the US now.
governments
Another thing shared and cooperation offered.
Fix your problems instead of expecting others to step in.
I’m really worried about this, I don’t think it’ll become a universal standard by all means but I can see Microslop forcing this onto people as a kinda next step from all the hardware limitation bs.
They would finally have total control over your OS.
They’ve been pushing the thin client for years and it’s never taken off. You and I wouldn’t be the target for this machine and neither would gamers or content creators. This is for business or grandparents.
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.
It must be noted that Big Tech is currently engaged in artificially forcing hardware prices upward, and that’s going on while Microsoft continues their generations-long quest 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.
I would be surprised if this WASN’T a conspiracy among all the billionaires in their secret clubs.
Plus laws going after alternative OSes, no doubt lobbied for by MS to eliminate competition for Windows, are starting to creep in now, see Cali and Colorado.
Next step will be mandating SecureBoot and limiting OS selection to a short list of approved options.
And the end game will be thin clients connected to the cloud.
Grandparents don’t want to rent shit. They want to buy it and be done. Source: this old fuck right here.
Fair. But what if 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.
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.
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.
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.
Self-hosters will be all over these
Assuming they’re not ridiculously locked down, which they probably are.
Not sure why they would be. There are plenty of these on the market already with no issues accessing the bootloader or installing other OSs on them. Same goes for Microsoft Surface device, Chromebooks, etc.
Think of how Wyse thin clients are typically ridiculously locked down, these are basically a newer version of those.
I never had a problem installing Debian on those Wyze boxes back in the day.
I have a couple Minisforum boxes at work with Linux on them running some metric monitors. And I have a Beelink s12 pro that does an absolutely beastly job at being my Jellyfin server.
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.
Why do you care? If you are using microsoft now it’s already a bad idea.
I don’t use Microsoft so I don’t really care what kind of crap they do.
Why do you care?
I don’t know. Because I care for the industry I guess…
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
What in the name is the flying spaghetti monster is Windows 365? An even less private version of windows that won’t work is you don’t have internet?
The OS is fully running on the cloud. You will be given a VM. Everything stays there. You may have to take permission to download a file from the VM onto your local device. You don’t get any choice about telemetry.
Am I interpreting this wrong, or do the specs look like absolute crap? I would expect a thin client would need hardware this good:
2 vCPU
4 GB RAM
64 GB Storage
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…
We use onedrive at work… everything goes onto onedrive, and then daily we have people bitching that onedrive has deleted their files.
Yup. You’ll have to babysit Onedrive UI client like a toddler. I use rclone when I need guarantees the files were indeed uploaded.
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
They are all such cunts!
OI
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 compute these actually look great, especially if they’re subsidized to get you into a subscription fee. As long as we can break into the bootloader and run Linux on these, they look to be very capable and efficient small compute boxes. 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, DDR5 memory, and Intel N series processors?
Self hosters and homelabbers will be licking their lips.
These fuckers themselves have increased the price of PC components and now they have the gall to release this cloud-only PC to “alleviate the problem of the current market scenario”.
I have a sneaking suspicion that these PCs will have some sort of protection so that nothing other than Win365 can run. Maybe a locked bootloader/secureboot?
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?
Yes. Very probably.
Of course, no security mechanism lasts indefinitely in the hands of a persistent hacker with physical access.
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
It is a Thinnet client. They have been around for at least 26 years.
Walk into any office or business that runs off the cloud or a local server and they will likely have dozens… I mean dozens of these lying around.
I know the gaming community looks at these like a vampire looks at a rosary but it isn’t new tech or even a new concept.
Back 25 years ago the company I worked for was looking into changing the computers for thin clients, then powered by JAVA, aaand of course dynamic workplaces that gets reinvented every seven years or so.
In the end they decided not to because people wanted to feel that they had their desk with their computer and not a floating office limbo as daily reminder that they are replaceable labour.
But most of all, their stationary computer had a CD ROM so they could listen to their own music while working and the thin clients couldn’t even customise your wallpaper.
You aren’t wrong. But what you just described is exactly why most companies choose thin clients.
No customization, no unauthorized software installs, no distractions for staff and they will just run forever without major updates. All IT has to do is maintain a server or offsite cloud environment.
Would I personally want one… no. But I can see this as an alternative to non techie people who just need a cheap computer for email, web browsing and the occasional word document.
I get what you’re saying. Back then I was sysadmin and we were running NT4 just fine with remote updates and without any unapproved software and fuck me if it would be a problem that Jeanette (57) in economy would be happy to have her grandchild for desktop backdrop while crunching numbers all day long. These are the small things that make people’s lives worthwhile in the workplace. My opinion is that it’s worth it and if it is not then the company isn’t worth it.
The only real case I can think of where people like thin clients is when they move between stations. I worked at a hospital that used them and it was a fantastic solution. A doctor/nurse/whatever could walk up to any station, beep their ID, and a couple second later their session would load up. It was a huge pain in the ass to build and maintain though. These new devices might actually have a benefit there. Managing W365 through Azure/Intune is leagues easier than managing Citrix with Windows VM pools.
Remember when you used to host your own citrix? Pepperidge Farm remembers
Lol citrix… now that is a name i have not heard in a very long time.
Please don’t buy this.
