Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud
Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud
You might boot laptops straight into a cloud OS in the future
What a terrible fucking idea
Are we doing the nobody reads the article thing here too? This isn't a replacement for Windows as an operating system, it's a cloud based version of the OS being sold to consumers. They're trying to compete with inexpensive Chromebooks, not take away your PC.
As an occasional sys admin, they've had stuff like this for enterprise forever, it's just self hosted. This is about as surprising as the sun coming up, they've been moving lots of their enterprise tech to consumer subscriptions.
Why would I read the article? I don't want to know the details. I want to be outraged.
Google tried that.
Anyway, I'll stick with Linux.
With Chromebooks? ChromeOS is a pretty solid Linux distro if you'd ask me. It is built around cloud-sync and Google Drive, but otherwise perfectly fine to use offline. Even Steam is supported nowadays
The best thing I ever did with that one used Chromebook I bought was install Gallium OS on it. I ended up with a fully functioning laptop that was able to fulfill my mobile computing needs for $50. It's a shame Gallium got discontinued. ChromeOS was very primitive and restrictive when I tried it 5 or 6 years ago, but you say they even support Steam now, so apparently they've made some improvements. Still wouldn't want to use it over a Linux distro like Gallium that would let me have full control of the device, though.
In case anyone reading this is interesting in alternatives to ChromeOS, more info can be found here: https://mrchromebox.tech/#alt_os
Just another move toward " you will own nothing and you will be happy". Gotta resist the botnet people, Free software anarchy ftw!
“You will own nothing, and you will like it.”
Permanently Deleted
Feel like this may be missing needed context.
For example, if I say, "man, I'm going to take a huge bite out of that thing!" it's a different conversation if I'm looking at a big sandwich versus looking at a newborn baby.
So... Anything else you might want to share about your specific statement or its focus?
How is this supposed to work in countries that have bandwidth caps, or slow internet connections?
It seems like every company these days wants to move everything to the cloud, but it doesn't mean it's going to happen. While something like this makes sense in some instances (like kiosks or similar maybe?) for the vast majority of use cases this is a non-starter.
When I had a laptop, it's wasn't always connected to the internet and it certainly did not have a mobile internet connection - nor would I pay for another one when I have a perfectly good one in the form of my phone.
Most of the time, believe it or not I didn't need an internet connection - half the time I was sitting at a park or a restaurant and playing singleplayer games or writing code.
I never connected to the restaurants free wifi, as I have trust issues with it. And I used a cable to hotspot when necessary. (Either that or i use the browser in my phone, mainly for stack overflow purposes)
If this happens, and windows goes Cloud ONLY - it would necessitate an always on and active internet connection.
God forbid if you decide to move out of signal range with it - let's say, watch a movie on the laptop while camping in the outback. On top of that, what if your internet goes down - ISPs can and have been a-holes in the past, and this isn't going to stop them in the future.
I have to wonder why anyone on earth would go for this? It's inherently limiting, despite all the AI gimmicks they are touting.
I for one and not switching back to windows any time soon - I mean I wasn't anyway, but I'm definitely not now.
On the other hand, this makes sense, why else would they release a sub par ARM chip in a surface pro 9 for the only 5G model? I always thought that decision made no sense. Now it makes perfect sense.
I live in a third world country. There is no way that this takes off here. Windows will just have to abandoned this country. But maybe they will as there is not a lot of money here. People will often buy laptops second hand at the market and the sellers load it with pirate content or can do it if they are asked. The only people really paying for Microsoft products here are the big corporations and foreigners, like myself, who are working here.
Additionally, most people just use their phones as a hotspot for data while at home. That is good enough for streaming and basic stuff. No one is going to get a fiber connection and pay a microsoft subscription. I honestly do not see this working here and I expect Microsoft will have to pull out or continue to offer offline options.
Microsoft has recently announced Windows Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Windows 11. Windows Copilot sits at the side of Windows 11, and can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Microsoft is currently testing this internally and promised to release it to testers in June before rolling it out more broadly to Windows 11 users.
Assuming this will use OpenAI API like other Microsoft's AI products, this is going to be expensive to operate. Subsidizing it indefinitely is surely not an option. How would Microsoft monetize it? By charging subscription like GitHub Copilot, or monetizing it somehow using users data they collected? I assume it would be the latter.
There's talk about Microsoft SoCs on their own products, much like Apple does the M1 SoCs.
These Microsoft SoCs would be used in Surface devices and likely have dedicated AI hardware. Again, much like Apple.
If we're talking about specialized models, not one generic LLM for everything a la GPT4, they might not have to be THAT big and could run on reasonably powerful devices.
I really doubt that, at least for the next few years. "AI Assistant" usually means LLMs, and even M2 struggles to run them mostly due to large compute and RAM requirements. If Microsoft could somehow release a truly local AI assistant feature that can run on average windows users' hardware, that would be shake the whole ML industry.
and I want to move fully off of windows, what a coincidence.
The situation has never been better for comfortably abandoning Windows. Come to Linux, we have penguins