This will materialize in the same way that Cloud gaming has taken the market by storm. It's nice when you want/need to game on a phone, but the experience doesn't hold up to native and the laws of physics are immutable, you can't defeat the latency of running your PC in a data center miles from your house. Even running Office apps will be a notably degraded experience.
Microsoft is crazy, but they've not done anything to kill the golden Windows goose in all this time, I can't see them thinking this would fly when they know the costs and downsides from doing xCloud.
I’ve got a cloud gaming machine at Paperspace running Parsec and it works great. Of course, I’m less than 50ms from their data center and have gigabit internet.
youre right, the hardware will never go away.... but there are many in the cloud-only corporate space where hardware is almost irrelevant as every single piece of software, including windows, is provisioned from the net. thats today. whats tomorrow going to look like for retail?
It's kinda built for that market entirely, remember Microsoft's biggest market is licensing. A hundred cheap computers is still 10k in licensing costs. One big bad gaming rig is only a single license.
We already had something similar (not exactly) back in the day with mainframes. You sat at a "dumb" terminal and shared central resources. The industry moved away from that for good reason.
Then we had Unix with remote X. Mix of local and remote resources. Useful for a long time in enterprises but slow connectivity prevented it going mainstream.
Then there was an attempted resurrection with Java. People probably don't remember but the original dream was code running anywhere, either local or central, and we had services that created new "dumb" terminals. Didn't really pan out.
Now we try to build everything with web technologies. Render locally but served remotely. Very much a hack and you see constant pushback and alternatives popping up.
This remote desktop concept only really works for businesses. It simplifies IT management and enforces stronger security controls. Other than that it won't catch on.
Could be very "useful" for VR hardware I think (for better or for worse)
As the article says, no doubt a snails-pace journey as W11 still needs to expire in 10 years at the very least
An ad revenue based OS is a novel idea.
If I have to constantly see ads on my desktop when I start up the free version of Windows, I will move fully to Linux Mint.
Not a single word about environment. It's as if everything he saw in the newspaper about global warming and the lack of resources did not exist. Have you ever seen a cloud system without a cooling system? No? Me neither.
I'm a Linux user, but I like having control over my own hardware, and I don't want my next PC to be an underpowered thin client designed only to work with a commercial cloud OS. I hope this doesn't take off any time soon.
From what I understand it’s negligible for some businesses, especially if said business owns Azure, a global cloud infrastructure platform that has servers everywhere. Not to mention that some things would probably still be done on hardware side, that the “OS” would probably be like a weird form of “always connected” shell that reacts upon the instructions sent from the cloud… it’s not like they think they can serve RDP to anyone with a desktop.
Most likely “Windows” will be like the client side part of the cloud operating system, reacting to API calls and such and applications would still be installed, but require certain conditions.
What I think is that they’re basically making a go for it again, to get their own little walled garden up and running, but this time with a cloudy twist. They’ve wanted to beat Apple at their own game so badly and for so long. Like “look at me I have enterprise and consumer space in the bag - wahoo!”
Honestly I’ve been in the beta channel for 11 for awhile now. I’m currently looking into switching back to Linux. I reinstalled Windows for my Daughter to play Minecraft with her friends but meh.
I assume you're talking about the Bedrock version, since the original Java version has a native Linux version. I've heard there are ways to get Bedrock running on Linux. While they might be beyond her knowledge, I imagine you could set it up for her
Yes there is a way that you can. It does however require purchasing the Google Play version and then some other stuff. Most likely what’ll happen is I’ll shrink the W11 install to minimal needed and then a distro for daily driving again.
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