Never mind Windows 365, I’ve yet to move on to Windows 11. Tried a few times and never liked it.
This seems like a really bad idea. Are there any examples of this that Lemmians are familiar with? Certainly can’t play games on it. Right?
I would move to Linux if this ever occurred, and I hate Linux.
I can only imagine how thin the margins will be on laptops that are physically incapable of running their own operating system and basically don’t qualify as general-purpose computers. The computer itself will be streamed to you over the internet and you’ll just have an IPL that handles your keyboard and mouse, the display, the network connection and the encrypted memory buffer you use to send files to your cloud PC or receive them onto a Microsoft-authorised USB device for external transfer.
Will also be so much fun in 5-10 years when only enterprise customers are allowed the luxury of being sold a local version of Windows, so your whole laptop freezes up every time your connection is interrupted and trying to turn it on without an internet connection just takes you to a 404 page baked into the bootstrap ROM.
More likely the end of desktop Windows. But I wouldn’t take my bet on it as Windows users often tend to accept everything Microsoft does, sooner or later.
People leaving Windows en masse needs three things:
- Continued enshitification, which will likely continue.
- More apps (games, productivity, etc.) having native support for Linux, or at least a viable alternative.
- Linux devs to prioritize user friendliness over gatekeeping/“just use macros” mentality.
I’m heavily thinking on moving to Linux in the future, likely when I’ll need to reinstall my OS. Then I’ll only keep around Windows for testing purposes.
EDIT: I wrote two instead of three
I feel like the threat to “kill off desktop PCs” has been going for years, yet it has never eventuated. I’m a bit too old and too tired of all the threats/clickbait lately to even start to worry about it actually happening.
If it does, I’ll find an alternative, but I very highly doubt it will happen anytime soon.
I remember there was a guy in the D development community that liked to block any and all changes to the DLL support, because he convinced himself, that smartphones/tablets will replace desktop PCs, especially Windows. Then he got so annoying on the forums he was thrown out from there, then he left the project. Since then most of the blocked changes are implemented, now it’s even possible to get the D runtime compiled as a DLL file in experimental mode (similar thing is done for ages under Linux with its own version of shared libraries).
