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 had a friend, who runs a company hosting various OSs designed for this use case. He was singing their praises, till I pointed out a flaw. I work in places with less than optimal internet access. Even the mobile phone network often collapses. Suddenly, my laptop being independently capable is very important.
I’ve moved away from windows a lot however. I mostly boot Ubuntu, with windows available if I need it. Most of the games I play also work fine under Linux now. It can be 6 months or more between windows boots.
I think it’s a problem for consumers, especially as long as traditional PCs and laptops remain ubiquitous. I could see this changing over time as the natural way of things. There are all kinds of examples of people giving up a superior experience for the sake of cost or convenience. :-/
Game playability depends on network bandwidth and latency and also on the type of game. I’ve played Hitman Blood Money over the net when Square Enix had a programme that let you play their games in a browser for 30 minutes or something for every ad you watched and that worked quite well on a 12mbit connection close to the servers. But I can’t imagine something like Counter Strike working well.
But no matter what happens the desktop can’t die as there are still Linux, BSDs and MacOS (maybe even Haiku but I don’t know how viable that is, certainly not for gaming anytime soon).
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.
I’ve moved completely to Arch and I don’t think I’m going back. It supports every game I’ve wanted to play up until now except Fall Guys, worst case I’ll set up a small Windows partition or VM for the couple of exceptions that I still want to play
I would move to Linux if this ever occurred, and I hate Linux.
