Yawn. People complaining about this apparently don’t work in IT and don’t know that thin clients which connect to a variety of different VDI solutions are pretty common in lots of different businesses and government agencies.
Fucking terminals. These are NOT PCs, this are TERMINALS! 1!!
40 year loop back to Wyse
Wyse never went away. They’re owned by Dell and continue selling thin clients to this day. The only difference here is that dell isn’t using their branding on these machines for some reason.
Please don’t buy this.
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
I’m so sick of Microsoft I actually installed Fedora KDE Plasma.
Genuinely, it’s nicer than windows lol
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying, but overall it works really well, has more features and looks slick.
Ain’t ever going back.
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying
I was on windows since 3.1, dual booted various distros of Linux the past 15 years, and removed windows from my computers over a year ago.
I would have to crawl forums to find fixes for stupid shit in windows once in awhile, less than Linux 15 years ago, but more than Linux in the lead up to getting rid of it. The thing that really pissed me off was the most egregious issues with win10/11 that id be looking for solutions to would always be changed back on the next update.That’s not the worse. The worse is when every goddamn awful thing in your paid-for OS is to be solvable with a time consuming sfc /scannow and another command which always take lots of tine.
I almost consider those [non-working but always peddled first] worse than a greybeard telling you can solve your [Linux] problem fetching the source of 10 packages from git and compiling manually.
Even Steam works perfectly fine.
The only games I can’t play are games that install rootkits that I don’t want anyway. Now I don’t have to explain to people that I don’t want malware on my PC and can just say “Ah, shucks, can’t play, Linux” 10/10 recommend.
Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)
I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.
I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)
Garuda is a great and very polished Arch distro. The bling in their riced themes is not so great for old machines, but a recent one has no issue. The documentation and community is also pretty good. Their dotfiles and choice of terminal tools were also great.
Plasma is great, I’m loving Kubuntu.
Our best hope is that companies outside the US stop buying Microsoft. People will need to produce computers for them. Then we in the US can import them and run Linux.
‘Someone, do something about our problem so we can take advantage of it’
Fuck this is exhausting
I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?
I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!
“Some adult needs to come fix my problems for me” seems to be super common these days. It’s partly why the US is in the state it’s in, but certainly not limited to the US.
What do you expect us to do? I don’t buy anti-consumer products as much as possible and I advise everyone I know to do the same. I explain why things are bad, but most people don’t care enough to listen. On top of that, these companies collude so that all the options end up being anti-consumer bullshit and you’re stuck trying to find the least bad one.
Its a reality. Why does apple use usb c now? Because someone else got tired of their shit.
Do you say similar about all the corporations and governments who have relied on the US for decades? Hmmm?
Yes. Yes we do. But please fix you god damned country
Yep, spoken like a true American.
corporations
I suppose you mean tech? Many parts of the world offer value for money products. Had it not been the US in anything any corporation needs, someone else will step up.
Besides which most corporations rely on China more than the US now.
governments
Another thing shared and cooperation offered.
Fix your problems instead of expecting others to step in.
Obviously these are going to be used for corporate or organizational settings, as it what was then with the so-called Network Computer thin clients which Oracle tried promoting but flopped.
I wonder why they failed previously 🤔🤔
I don’t know Oracle’s product but the company I work for has had a ton of people working on VDI for like 15 years now. It’s a solved problem. The only real annoying part was that it required pretty solid bandwidth and people would try using it on shitty Internet and then expect us to fix it. I’m kind of surprised it took this long for a consumer version to get off the ground. I would never use it because it sounds like a privacy nightmare but most people don’t think about that shit.
Asus and Dell announce their own Mac Minis but this time with blackjack and hookers.
For work, this would be great.
For home, hell nah.
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
Apparently my job will be getting rid of our personal local network drives (we each have our own only we can connect to) and moving that to Microsoft one drive. Our IT guy hates the new changes, but the orders come from way above. Not sure how well it will work…
We use onedrive at work… everything goes onto onedrive, and then daily we have people bitching that onedrive has deleted their files.
Yup. You’ll have to babysit Onedrive UI client like a toddler. I use rclone when I need guarantees the files were indeed uploaded.
Don’t worry, to make it work,he’ll only need to open the firewall to the Internet for dozens of MS subdomains and thousands of IP’s in ranges that can randomly change from day to day. Totally more an issue for systems which might have been segregated from the Internet before!
/s
Goodbye local Windows, you mean. Except I said goodbye two years ago and never looked back or missed it. Windows does nothing I need, and does it poorly.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure, but ultimately I don’t care all that much.
I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure
I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.
Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)
Desktops are just hardware. Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they’ll get pretty, too.
Desktops are just hardware.
Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they’re sideways are the other properties of that hardware:
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Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts
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General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them
What I’m worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they’d like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.
But…
Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they’ll get pretty, too.
No desktops means more server options that people use at home. It’s still motherboards, RAM, GPU, etc.
Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.
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(Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
Right now, one year of Microsoft 365 costs a full hundred dollars… and there is still a strong desktop market.
If you’re right that the tech industry is willing to price consumers out of personal computers - and it looks like they are - I can only imagine what will happen to those subscription prices.
If you think about it: It is very wasteful for all of us to have local computation power at home. So many wasted resources as most people use their PCs only the fraction of the time. Same can be said for cars and many other appliances.
Maybe the solution are shared cloud resources, but obviously not owned by those big corporations, but owned by the people on a local, regional, national level?
And it isn’t wasteful to be forced to replace perfectly good hardware and filling landfills with it because fucking companies want to own your data, your money and your life? People like you are the reason these assholes feel empowered to push this crap.
Relax my fellow human.
Neither did I imply that people should be forced to throw away their hardware, nor did I say that no one should own anything or completely surrender to any corporate overlords (actually I said the opposite).
All I meant is that sharing resources sometimes makes sense. When I see people buy very expensive and powerful machines for browsing the internet and regular office work all I can think is “what a waste”, blind consumerism. I think we can do better. What “better” is, I’m not certain either.
now that you say this, it is also so wasteful for all of us to leave our homes empty while we go to work! we need to illegalize homeownership, and we need to require all landlords to host multiple families in their properties! It’s not only the empty space, the empty beds and toilet, but also the fridges that keep consuming power, even though nobody is actively using them!
Well yeah it is, but is most likely much harder to solve co-living like that in a way that’s acceptable for almost any people. Whereas what was suggested here is that people pool their resources and lend/rent to each other.
Nothing about forcing anything on anyone, and people who want to be able to have exactly the CPU they need at any given time would probably not be interested.
Network down, can’t use Computer. Government Shit, can’t use computer. Cloud Computing companies shit? Can’t use computer. I want to be able to use it whenever wherever without trusting the whole Chain to hold.
If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!
Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?
Jeez you really hit a nerve here, with your pretty sane concept about sharing resources communally.
I guess some people really don’t like the word wasteful or something.
It’s quite interesting to see the reactions. I’m happy to call it “inefficient” instead? I’m not a native English speaker so maybe the choice of word indicated to some that I wanted to blame people, that was not my intention.
Maybe it’s the fact that many users here are very tech savvy and would never want to give away sovereignty of their devices, which I can fully relate to. But I believe this perspective totally skews what an average user needs in computational power for everyday tasks.
This “communal computing” solution is just an idea. Maybe it’s stupid and has many downsides I haven’t considered, but I think it’s quite apparent, that we’ll not be able to continue this way forever, especially if more and more people on this planet rightfully want access to all these amenities.
We feel very entitled to our technology, and I fully think it plays an important part in open society, having access to information etc.
But it’s simple ridiculous to believe that it’s some kind of basic human right for everyone to own one or many high end devices for stuff that could easily be done with a 5-10 year old device.
I jumped ship like 2 years ago too, but kept a “windows game box” i5 8500 with an rx6400 to play.
The sff (usff?) thinkcentre 6500t with linux is so good it’s insane. Somewhere 6-9 months ago I just stopped booting the win-box.
One day I’ll probably switch os on it and use the better PC as my daily driver, but my quad core is enough for now, crazy actually when I think of the sluggishness of windows on a “+50%” (or more) pc…
Goodbye local Windows with Linux having a 3% market share means entirely different market & society too, regardless of our Linux desktops that can’t get new parts.
I’ll just point out that 3% market share is still bigger than the entire market when started building PCs. And that’s assuming they can make this attractive to anyone. Single point of failure for your entire company? Single supplier who has you over a barrel when they want to raise prices? Who in their right mind would go for that.
We’ll see. The fact that it’s on offer doesn’t mean people will bite. I’ve seen the industry try so much stupid shit that people said no to. Free computer full of ads? No. Scan cat? No. Packing LEDs into things that don’t need to light up or be hotter? Well… they got us there.
Free computer full of ads? No.
people are paying for that nowadays. they call them smartphones. even the operating system and base apps show ads.
Yes, good points, but what can make financial sense doesn’t need to make economical sense.
Perhaps in such events we can transition to smaller, maybe RISK-V boards with components from various manufacturers.
But yes, I too keep hoping consumers would speak up & stop bs practices. Then again, if we kill a consumer industry you can’t just bring it back in a year, and megacorps can weather in the meantime by offering consumers short-term incentives if they make the switch. It’s how all the personal data collection by private corps started, why eg Google had free services (and no ads) & yet was already being valued in the billions.
Assuming the bootloader is not super locked down or even nonexistent, think Wyse thin client levels of locked down.
It’s like a Chromebook, but for Windows. Only it doesn’t run Windows. Please buy our garbage.
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
