The End of the Desktop?
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
Microsoft Virtual Desktop Google's Stadia (both sited in the article) are both indicators of something big happening in the desktop computing market.
I suppose it makes sense. Plenty of us use elastic resources to power our web applications; why pay for a massive server when your typical use case requires much less power, and you can easily scale up with a few mouse clicks?
That concept translates to the desktop, as well. I just dropped a few thousand dollars on a new development machine, but I don't need that same power when I'm screwing around on Reddit.
Of course the sticking point will be whether or not it's actually cheaper to use a scalable remote desktop than it would be to just buy better hardware. Since the obvious goal of this is to ring out more and steadier profits, I strongly doubt this will be the case.
I'm a "power-using enthusiast" because I use Gnome3? Gee, thanks... but wasn't desktop a thing despite (in spite) the so-called "Major Companies". Canonical for one made "Unity" which was about as painful as a Rubix-cube covered in shards of glass. It couldn't have died sooner. I mean that what you get when a "Major" company tries to dominate the FOSS space - layoffs and an alienated base. Red Hat was corporate from the outset, they never pretended to otherwise, which is probably why they are actually successful and not using millions of person fortune to put on a show while loosing boku bucks in the background and laying off employees.
In short, desktop is not dead. FOSS people love desktops. Microsoft doesn't dictate anything anymore.
I disagree. FOSS people love webapps, machine learning, and other big-computing stuff on the whole. Hardly any work is being done towards personal "small-computing" and, frankly, hardly any ever was. I can guess at a bunch of reasons why, but it mostly comes down to the problem space just not being interesting to very many people with the skill set to do anything about it.
Big and Small computing: https://hackernoon.com/big-and-small-computing-73dc49901b9a
Besides UI programming and not requiring users to install anything, what other advantages are there?
Don't underestimate the importance of the abstraction layer either! There's a lot of crap it's removing from the equation. You don't have to worry about cross-platform support, installing prerequisites, trying to deal with the program insisting that it needs MXYZPT32.DLL and can't find it when you go to run it...
The downside is that it's feudalism. But, hey, under feudalism, you don't have to defend your own land!
There are downsides to outsourcing defense of your land to the local lord, of course. The lord can force updates and sell your likes to the Rooskies, and the profitable enterprise that enables him to defend your land is the industrial-scale farming of human eyeballs. Maybe it'd be better if 7-11 carried Snow Crash sidecar nukes - i.e. if there were decentralized, open-source platforms that could do all this stuff - but I don't think they do.
Yet. Growth mindset.
That's not true.