Looks like the year of the linux desktop might happen afterall. Though differently than what most are expecting.

The cloud sounds like a great move given that most folks in the US have the choice of trash tier cable or vdsl. Unless Microsoft is planning to upgrade everyone’s Internet connection I can’t even see this working for normal folks. This as a service stuff needs to die in a fire sooner rather than later.

I really appreciate the article flagging both Microsoft and Apple but really only devoting a single paragraph speculating on what Apple might do:

Over in Apple land, serious photography and video workers will still run high-powered and high-cost Macs. Others, however, will use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Mac mini as a service or other Macs on the cloud services such as Virtual Mac OS X, MacStadium, and MacinCloud.

These are all third party offerings (some perhaps in partnership with Apple), not a direct Apple product. At least as far as I can tell, Apple hasn’t had a significant push towards making a core part of their desktop computing experience a cloud-based experience. A comparison would be between Keynote versus Powerpoint, with the former still an actual application shipped with macOS whereas the latter is now primarily offered through the Office365 subscription cloud based service and a separate purchase needed for a dedicated software application.

Between WindowsCloudBookOS, macOS, and Linux, I reckon a lot of people would rather settle with macOS once WindowsCloudBookOS is required rather than work with Linux, in so far as Apple’s product offerings remain compelling versus scouring the internet for figuring out what pre-built hardware plays nicely with Linux.

Now with that said, Microsoft’s cloud push is increasingly frustrating. LibreOffice and de-Googling / de-Microsofting would be such a great goal, and supporting efforts like Valve’s on SteamDeck and SteamOS to further enhance and build out the tools to allow games to run on Linux will increase reach.

Fundamentally though, MS in particular will remain the vendor of choice for most large institutions due to institutional momentum, which moves glacially slow, and it’s very hard to transition the day-to-day people using MS tools to something comparable. I don’t see many institutions mandating a switch to Linux client-side, and depending on institutional requirements the “thin client” approach solves some headache (e.g. particularly private or sensitive data may be better accessed using a thin client through a VPN to minimize the ability for the data to leave premises).

why does everything need to be in the cloud? it’s so annoying, just let me have my own computer with my own storage.