Windows 365 Cloud PC | Hacker News Reader

Windows 365 Cloud PC

microsoft.com

236 pointsWalterSobchak251 comments

> Windows 365 provides an instant-on boot experience

Unless they mean it'll instantly show a loading screen, I'll bet it doesn't.

I've used various VDI implementations over the years, and they've all been pretty slow to get to a working desktop.

I also wonder about latency. I have a 100/20 FTTC connection at home, which I find to be fast. Most recent VDI I used was Citrix, where I was expected to code in a VDI hosted in Netherlands (I'm in the UK) - the latency when typing drove me fucking NUTS! It was mostly just long enough to be intensely irritating and distracting, but occasionally latency would increase to a few seconds too.

Just use TRAMP/VSCode remote.

They can keep it hot in memory similar to serverless. If everyone uses the same base copy of Windows, then they can easily fork from one parent copy. A copy on write network filesystem + some Windows Registry and Explorer tricks can take care of the remaining 20%.

> then they can easily fork from one parent copy.

Ironically windows does not implement fork()

AFAIK Windows kernel is advanced enough to implement fork if necessary. WSL 1 uses it.

Think at hypervisor level. Most VM solutions support some form of memory deduplication. VM level cloning wouldn't be too far from that model IMO.

This is exactly what VMware Horizon VDI does to create desktop VMs very quickly, called Instant Clone (aka VM Fork), and has been around for several years now.

With that, you don't even need to do deduplication after the fact, it comes for free. When a new VM is forked, it's memory and disk are copy-on-write from the source/parent VM.

Windows NT was POSIX compatible.

The ZwCreateProcess kernel api can do fork() semantic.

It is possible. But if achieving a reasonable performance was doable, they wouldn't need wsl2.

that's a non-sequitur. windows not being Linux at the same time that a Mac was also Unix is what created WSL 1, and the limitations of WSL 1 led to WSL 2.

Neither does GitHub and yet...

Windows Sandbox on Windows 10 is pretty quick to boot, and uses a base copy of Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if that's similar to whatever solution they've created for Cloud PC.

I've recently used it to validate/automate whether one of our graphics tool using d3d12 would work, as it had to be deployed on some cloud machine. With small amount of batch file coding and some flags to enable file sharing and DirectX I was able to do it (for some reason, could not make it automatically start the app, but since it was for semi-automatic testing, it was okay - if I tried more, I'm sure there would've been a way).

Same here, but Microsoft, having source code all the way to the client, probably can do better than third-party providers.

And the latency, I completely understand you. You learn to live with it after a while, sometimes you don't even notice it.

> Same here, but Microsoft, having source code all the way to the client

That right there is the reason they are doing this. It's not about customers or what people want it's about keeping control of the whole stack, and the power that comes with that.

Not sure if you're aware, partners have access to Windows source. They also get to review and give feedback on upcoming changes.

Citrix is a partner, so is VMWare afaik.

I decided to reject Citrix or Remote Desktop dev contracts on matters of principle, because you never know what irrational workflow they're coming up with next. If your customer/employer values their control-freakery higher than dev efficiency or sanity, I'm out. Recently, I had a contract where they used Citrix to work on a stupid Windows VM, only to execute Docker containers, winbash build scripts, and git (plus cross-platform IDE). Madness! A friend of mine even has to endure web dev via Citrix. Have fun doing CSS transitions on Edge in a VM in a browser tab. Or attempt to get Teams meeting invites from Outlook-in-VM out to your native or web Teams client on your local machine (as required, you know, for audio/mic). It's terrifyingly stupid.

I had one project I was working on for a client where they thought they were super important and confidential (NVM they were neglecting all of the real security best practices). One of the things they decided is that as part of the project everyone would have to move a VDI solution in a different network and then everyone would have to do all their work from this network, in the name of security. The problem was I was only interacting with the cloud side of this project, working with the actual cloud public API, so everything I was working on was already public facing and didn't care about network concerns.

I ended up writing an email to the decision markers in the project outlining why "1) I didn't want a VDI 2) A VDI would take me forever to setup properly for my workflow anyway* 3) It would do nothing for the project's security to have me working on a VDI and 4) It would be a pain in the but trying to work on a VDI.

I was told that my objections were valid and true but I needed to work on a VDI anyway. It was at that moment I stopped caring about the project.

I did end up winning in the end however as when I finally agreed to do it (not my money the company was setting on fire) they asked me to send a list of what I'd need my VDI to be setup like. So I sent them a list of everything I'd need to mimic my current working environment and what I was doing now, including a Linux OS (The VDI solution was Windows only) with X11 and i3 setup. A full Doom Emacs configuration, special developer libraries and tooling, and several other items. With a long list of alternatives I would need installed if my first choice wasn't available, with specific versions, etc.

I sent off that email and they said they'd set me up with the desktop environment I need and let me know when it was finished being created. I am still waiting for that email letting me know it is setup, and happily working from my real machine until it does become available.

The moral of the story is sometimes the easiest way to thrawt management incompetence is to throw it reams of useless busy work that it will be festering away on while you can get real work done.

Malicious compliance is a great strategy when done right.

Same!

After out-of-hand saying "no" once, I had someone offer me a contract by way of a friend. I valued the friend so I met with the client. About half way through, the client's (a large-ish health org) point-of-contact asked about my internet connection because they wanted me to remote desktop into their windows-citrix-machine-thingamputer for "billing purposes"... it was an iOS(in swift) developer role.

I didn't say anything about how preposterous that was and politely declined in email after the meeting. Or so I thought. I, apparently, did so much talking with my eyebrows that it got back to my friend... we broke out laughing when I explained what caused be to be "visually rude" (whatever that means).

When there is one red flag, there are bound to be others.

I'd be skeptical too if they hadn't made it work with XCloud.

I used to think Citrix had a lot of latency, when I was working remotely for a particular client, but then one day I went to the office and used the physical PC I'd been using remotely, and it turns out that Windows just sucks that hard. Sometimes it really does just take like half a second for a context menu to appear. Ghastly performance all around, and it was a hot rod of a PC, too.

This comes down to crap VDI implementation. I had a Citrix box at a previous gig, and I could stream YouTube from New York to Florida with very little latency (watchable for the PowerPoint decks I needed to view). If there’s not a GPU connected to the VM (or a slice of one via SR-IOV) you’re gonna have a bad time.

> Unless they mean it'll instantly show a loading screen, I'll bet it doesn't.

with some 50Gbps Ethernet one should be able to quickly load a GB or two os ram image quickly. basically, un-hobernate, with decent infra.

more sophisticated options are having some kind of generic os image in ram one can spawn an instance of, load with local per-user configurations quickly.

being able to get an os going quickly is not a new trick.

> Unless they mean it'll instantly show a loading screen, I'll bet it doesn't.

You absolutely can. I am not sure what tech Microsoft is using, but a similar experience can be had with VMware Horizon VDI product with something called Instant Clone, which is essentially forking an already booted up Desktop VM. On each esxi hypervisor host, you would have one of these parent/seed VMs that is booted up and ready in a frozen state, and when a new desktop VM is needed, it's created from the seed/parent using copy-on-write memory/disk and runtime state less than a second.

They don’t start out that way.

Usually the issue with VDI startup times these days is the layers on layers of group policy and agents that need to execute. You don’t notice on PCs because most folks lock their devices instead of rebooting.

Latency like that sounds like a problem in the company network stack somewhere… UK to Netherlands isn’t exactly a high latency wan link.

> 100/20 FTTC connection at home

Same. Now the client has me working in a Amazon Workspace w/ Windows 10. Typing and screen update latency is terrible, I have to run it down scaled on my 4K screen to make it bearable, it disconnects or shuts down due to inactivity and reconnect/boot reminds me of that time I booted Windows 7 on a Dell Mini 9 Netbook (probably an Intel Atom w/ 2GB of RAM) and worst of all, my happy place tool chain is back in macOS or Linux.

> the latency when typing drove me fucking NUTS!

I had the exact same experience.

Back at my old company, all of our development was done on a secure Sungrid server farm that could only be accessed from the VDI environment. The way my coworker initially showed me how to do it, the terminal was sent to an X session on the VDI, and yet everyone at the company was OK with this. I explained how typing is something that you do tens to hundreds of thousands of times per day, and that a few frames of latency every single key press really fatigues you mentally. The sungrid farm didn't support SSH (for load balancing purposes,) so I eventually had to deepdive into the spec for how to access via terminal, and wrote a script.

But that's not the worst part as I was interviewing around at other companies, I asked them how their computing is done, and you wouldn't believe how many companies have their development environment set up this exact way! These are all major semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley too, not some "IT as an afterthought" industry!

It's refreshing to see that VDIs are about as popular with developers on HN as Google Stadia is with hardcore gamers.

My windows 10 pc goes from off to login screen in under 5 seconds and opening a remote session to my Amazon windows server takes about the same. So I’m sure that instant on experience isn’t too far off. I agree the latency will be brutal and even with a gigabit connection typing on my Amazon windows server is irritating.

Neat! Modern thin-client life is actually pretty good. Connectivity of some kind is ubiquitous enough these days that my computer for the last couple of years has been an Arch VM in a local Linode datacenter.

I don't need to fuss with file syncing solutions because I only ever access them from the one machine, I just happen to access that machine remotely. Backups are seamlessly handled by Linode snapshotting my disk every so often. I can happily run little webservers, etc, with pretty decent availability.

The thing that sits on my desk is a second hand, small form factor ThinkCentre I picked up dirt cheap when some corp was done with it. All it needs to do is run a terminal ssh'ed into a Tmux session and a local instance of Firefox. I get basically the same experience whether I'm at my desk, on my iPad or using Blink on my phone.

It's actually made me _less_ concerned about my unreliable broadband connection. If my main link goes down, I just hotspot to the 4G on my phone. The latency is a little worse but the bandwidth isn't actually relevant. All my chonky uploads like build artifacts, docker images, etc, all go direct from my Linode to wherever they need to go. Very civilised.

What web server software you run in your VPS, and what resources/control/files your local firefox can access/manage?

Oh all sorts of things. Mostly it's just a development instance of whatever I'm working on, which is usually something in Go these days. I use Caddy to route to various internal services based on the domain the request comes in on. I use Cloudflare to have a wildcard DNS such that I can just start using anything.vps.example.com and have the traffic show up at my machine. Also other bits and bobs like a Discourse server, photo gallery, etc.

My local firefox doesn't do anything fancy back to the VPS. It's just a browser, but it does spend a lot of time accessing the dev instances I'm running on the server. It's nice to be able to easily access my in-progress code over a proper domain, over the proper internet, with proper TLS rather than localhost. Browsers handle localhost differently than real domains and it's handy to shake out those errors early on in a project.

I do something similar. One Linode for x86 development and one Ec2 instance for arm64.

My home office, work office, and laptop (two Windows, one Mac) all ssh to one of these two and with tmux I pick right back up no matter where I go!

I've been doing this for a year or two now and it's much nicer than using local VMs since it takes up less memory and compute on the host (two of which only have 8GB RAM).

So this is what Microsoft wants the PCs to run that can't run Windows 11.

That said, it is a nightmare for privacy, security, and openness.

A nightmare for privacy and security given that they have the data (and likely the means to unlock it).

A nightmare for openness given that data interchange will be discouraged in favor of the walled garden.

It is technically possible to encrypt VM in a way that even host can't decrypt it. AMD Epyc CPUs supports encrypted memory.

> Finally, encryption is used across the board. All managed disks running Cloud PCs are encrypted, all stored data is encrypted at rest, and all network traffic to and from your Cloud PCs is also encrypted.

That being said, this level of deep integration means that the moment you boot the cloud PC, all of the data are potentially very vulnerable on the software level.

That's not the audience for this.

I'm sorry, but I have to challenge this.

> A nightmare for privacy and security given that they have the data (and likely the means to unlock it).

365 customers' data is fully encrypted and MS cannot just decrypt it with a click of a button, it is also sharded across multiple storage silos, so that it cannot even be copied out of your tenant unless you are the customer. They also have a 'high encryption' option where the encryption key can be held on-premises and not in any MS data-centre.

> A nightmare for openness given that data interchange will be discouraged in favor of the walled garden.

I have no idea where you got this idea from, or what you even mean. 365 is a platform. If you want to run Linux VMs in it, you can. If you want to reach out and exchange data with non MS services like other cloud apps outside of 365 (or even on-premises apps) you can.

Picture your own personal datacentre full of kit but run by someone else. That is the 365 experience. I'm not someone who drinks the MS Kool-aid, but I do know the facts as I work in a MS partner company. If you'd said something similarly wrong about AWS, I would defend that too.

Microsoft can ban your Microsoft account arbitrarily so GP is right, you don't own your data anymore and Microsoft can keep it and forbid you access, regardless of encryption or not.

I don't recall every to see a post on HN that Microsoft has terminated access to some ones MS (Business) Account. I am sure someone has got their account terminated I just don't recall ever seeing a post about here.

we have seen plenty for google, Amazon, Facebook. I see no reason to think Microsoft is different. Just because we haven't heard of a case yet, doesn't mean it is not possible or that it will never happen. it's more likely just a matter of time.

Sorry, but I don't think that ANY big player, especially from the US, can/may resist NSA/FBI requests to access customer data. And we know from Snowdens leaks that those requests don't just come for criminal or terrorist cases but are routinely used for economic espionage.

Microsoft has pretty well documented cases where they do go to court to prevent data from being shared with governments. Of course, they are not always successful, but they do give a good try.

I'm excited for this, my wife is an accountant and often asks me to help her with VBA macros.

Which means that for this reason alone I have to dedicate 40GB of my laptop's hard drive to a Windows partition with office, adobe, and other stuff installed.

And if she's not physically near me, I have no way of getting the script to her with any guarantee it'll behave the same or work at all on her work computer.

Having worked within unix for so long, I'd started taking it for granted how everything is either portable, or can be easily containerized, Windows and accompanying products are incredibly environment finicky and janky overall.

To be able to just do the remote version of "handing over the laptop" will be a godsend.

Like using, say, an AWS Workspace?

This isn't new, I don't believe.

Citrix existed in the 90s

I hope they open it to consumers soon. I need a personal VDI to keep personal stuff off my work laptop. AWS workspaces is OK, but they seem to charge for the directory now, so it's kinda expensive

40GB seems cramped for a Windows install, I usually do 80-100GB boot drives.

That being said Windows will happily exist as a VM, issues only arise when you need a dedicated GPU or OpenGL.

since it's gotta be shared with, i assume a mac or linux VM, he's probably trying to cut it as close as possible

> with office, adobe, and other stuff installed.

It will be interesting to see if Adobe's activation/licensing copes with this, or every time you log in the software needs a new activation as it detects the underlying machine is different.

I'm excited for this, my wife is an accountant and often asks me to help her with VBA macros. I like that someone else had the same working from home experience as I did...aka "can you come look at this form for me, some macro isn't running". I wonder what is the overall percentage of VB macros written, especially in big corporation, by other people than the stated file owners.

The commentary here so far is technical — “it’s just RDP” — but I suspect the real story here is on the business side. The fact that no pricing is available is telling - this isn’t for consumers. But for big companies who get this as part of their enterprise agreements, I bet this is a big deal for their IT departments.

If it's a business service RDP that would be Azure Virtual Desktop. Again, it very well may be something different. But this announcement doesn't make clear what that would be.

The announcement explicitly says that this is Azure Virtual Desktop.

"Windows 365 is built on Azure Virtual Desktop, but it simplifies the virtualization experience—handling all the details for you. "

Ah, I missed that. I guess we just have to wait and see some details. "Simplifies the experience" I don't know what that means.

Azure Virtual desktop was like a low level API… Citrix and VMWare sell brokering/provisioning solutions that instrument the Azure desktop.

Now that Citrix and VMWare brought this business to Azure, Microsoft is launching a competing offering. Nice guys they are lol.

There's a full video out there for 365 admins somewhere on the MS site (I'm sorry, the URL is on my other machine).

"Simplifies the experience" means, that with just 3 provisioning checkboxes against a user object in 365, you can grant that user a Windows 365 machine including all the 365 apps and your standard policies. It takes about 20 minutes from enablement for the VM to be ready, and the VM remains persistent for the lifetime of it's provisioning. The cost model is a fixed fee per provisioned user, per month.

Yeah, this feels like a "why do you need an IT department?" kind of thing. Just rent your computers from MSFT and they'll take care of maintaining them, upgrading, etc. "It's all in the cloud" and all that.

It seems like the logical end goal would be you pay your subscription fee to Microsoft and you just sign in and all your subscription-based apps and data are just there, in the cloud, always available. You stop paying, they'll all go away... or are limited in some way.

I work in IT now and would love to get out of VDI. Other stuff to do!

This makes sense. It is a competitor to Amazon's Windows Desktop environments. Microsoft should beat AWS's offering here because well, they make the OS that they are virtualizing.

I can see this working for a lot of places where you want good information security. You can never get the data out of the cloud except via screenshot.

> good information security

> You can never get the data out of the cloud except via screenshot.

pick one

100% guaranteed, cast-iron, watertight security is impossible - but VDIs could potentially prevent whole classes of attack. It's about increasing the barrier against realistic threat models.

I completely agree - many attack vectors are more difficult, and some are impossible. However, saying "you can never get the data out of the cloud except via screenshot" is, first of all, untrue, as other means exist, and second, preventing access to data is not the most important security aspect of such a system.

> Microsoft should beat AWS's offering here because well, they make the OS that they are virtualizing.

Not necessarily. They have already had a similar service. This seems to be a simplification of that service? Maybe it's sort of like Amazon offering Lightsail as an alternative to EC2? After clicking around the site for a half hour trying to figure out pricing for Azure Virtual Desktops, I gave up. I figured if you have to ask how much it is, then I can't afford it. Now they are launching a service seemingly directed to users like me, but they still can't give us prices. I assume they will in time for launch, but I'm getting really sick of hunting for prices on Azure. Every minute I have spent on that site has been wasted.

I doubt they would beat AWS on pricing. The AWS instances appear to be really well priced relative to what you could get if you tried to do the same with EC2. I couldn't see MS being as cheap. From what I remember, Azure is generally more expensive across the board.

Microsoft's secret weapon here is that if you subscribe to Microsoft 365 Business/Enterprise (which is a prereq for this according for what they've said), they include a Windows license that can be ran on Azure for VDI. On AWS, you have to buy CALs and licensing for the instances (Windows VDA licenses? I last looked into that years ago). Or you can buy the licenses from AWS but I'm sure that's not the rate you'd pay getting them directly from Microsoft (and then you often have to use Windows Server which doesn't have things like WSL2).

That's not a gigantic barrier if you're an enterprise, but figuring out licensing for Workspaces if you don't have a couple smart Microsoft admins and money to burn is really hard. This is easy, since all of the license entitlements are enforced through their portal. (if you can start an instance you are licensed)

If you want an AWS instance, it's not much more complicated than pick your instance and go. Of course, we're talking about the AWS console here, which is not so easy if you aren't used to it. If you know your way around, then it's about the same as getting anything else AWS. You don't have to deal with licenses at all.

The pricing is really cheap. Looking at the pricing of instances on EC2, I don't know how they get so cheap. I'm sure the answer is in the details if I were to go digging (different hardware) but it's cheap.

I don't think the Asure alternative will be even close. While AWS makes Workspaces easy and affordable for just about any individual, that person is probably still not the target for MS. I'm guessing this new offering is simply the same service as they already offer, for businesses which want systems for less than 100 people, and are still able to dish out a load of cash.

The benefit to Azure is that it's Microsoft. They aren't going to compete on pricing for anything. If pricing is your main concern, then you don't to Azure (or even Google Compute.) If your boss says you have to use Azure, then that's when Azure has the advantage. ;)

> around the site for a half hour trying to figure out pricing for Azure Virtual Desktops

Pricing for Azure Virtual Desktop starts with a hundred users minimum. (available at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/)

The service is free (you need Microsoft E3/E5 license), you just pay for the VMs, which you can customize any way you want.

> Microsoft should beat AWS's offering here because well, they make the OS that they are virtualizing.

I don't see the obvious connection here. Software is easy to install. But Azure is not really close in scale of deployment to AWS.

It is the "next closest" right?

Sure - they won't be much disadvantaged. But I meant that if they went Azure only or tried to be the only provider, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. I completely expect them to want a good experience on AWS hosted desktop. Maybe not the best, but I don't expect them to have a significant advantage. (apart from possible integrations)

And until now at least, workspaces seemed nicer than Microsoft VDI. I presume this changes it. Look forward to testing

At first I thought "another RDP solution" but then I saw this line:

  Windows 365 also creates a new hybrid personal computing category called Cloud PC, which uses both the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device...

Does that mean it makes use of local hardware past the capabilities it would need as a thin client? GPU acceleration, etc? It'll be interesting to find out.

I think you're reading too much into it. Sure, it's possible that they have some sort of RDMA technology that allows you to automagically offload work from your local machine to a cloud GPU/CPU, but I doubt it. My guess is that it'll be something lame like "having a synced workspace (aka onedrive) and being able to edit documents on it locally and have it synced to your cloud workspace"

Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised to see cloud auth (AD) so you can pay every month to use the capabilities of your local PC that you already paid for.

Buy a PC so you can remote into a crappier cloud PC? Pass. Lol.

It's probably something like the Teams integration VMWare shipped in Horizon (in collaboration with Microsoft).

https://techzone.vmware.com/resource/microsoft-teams-optimiz...

Maybe this will help...

What is hybrid cloud? https://www.netapp.com/hybrid-cloud/what-is-hybrid-cloud/

Windows Server has had something like this for a while, it's called RemoteFX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteFX

I guess we'll have to wait to see if this is just a rebranding of the same thing or something new.

Doesn't remotefx just render on the server which seems different then what's being described here?

According to other sources, Microsoft will reveal Windows 365 pricing on Aug. 2, when the service becomes generally available.

Cool to see RDP-ish type capabilities outside of tech circles but will wait until the price is revealed. My guess is that it will still be out of reach for most consumers, unfortunately.

My guess is $10-20 / month for an anemic VM that runs like a raspberry pi.

Leaked pricing was $31 USD for 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. It does have 10 Gbps download and 4 Gbps upload though!

4GB RAM? That gets you a whole 2 browser tabs.

Or half an instance of VS Code.

It's like they've never even used their own browser(Edge/Chrome) or something. 4GB for a Windows OS is hilarious.

They will just update Edge to sleep background tabs like mobile OSs do. Most phones have 4gb or less ram and load websites just fine. Might also encorage web devs to cut down on bloat if they are targeting a 4gb windows vm.

> 10 Gbps download and 4 Gbps upload though!

That's great but considering most ISPs in the US are still < 100Mbit on the download and cap the upload at something ridiculous like 10Mbit, 10Gbps on the server side isn't going to be much use.

Even my workplace caps at around 100Mbps upload meaning uploading a 64GB video off an SD card to my "cloud PC" will take forever.

well, being able to print to a local printer or access a local usb-drive is making use of the "capabilities of the device", and certainly within the grasp of boring good old technologies over RDP

They must be talking about run of the mill RDP stuff like using USB Redirection, multi-touch support, and so on to make the remote machine feel local.

I read the whole announcement. Sounds like RDP which we’ve had for 20+ years. I’m assuming it’s different but this doesn’t explain how. “We’ve created a cloud PC” So a thin client?

I got a few sentences in and thought 'thin client' too.

Which is newspeak for “terminal” ;-)

And Dropbox is just rsync, right?

Hasn't this ultimately been the downfall of Dropbox? Not that consumers are doing it themselves, but Microsoft, Google, etc. all spun up competitors and turned their main product into a feature.

Their one selling point is being the independent option, and I'm not sure the people who care about that are actually large enough to sustain them long term...

Eh? Kinda. Storage still costs money and they’re all about the same. Dropbox loses because of preferential integration and defaults.

All software is replicable by a competitor. How you create it into a product is what matters. That's what the 'rsync' dumb argument misses.

To be fair so far it looks like it's just VNC from a browser. Call me when I open an app and it's transparently run from a remote server, similar to what they've done with the Windows Defender Application Guard (i.e. it looks like a regular Edge window, but it's run in a VM)

Opening a browser in a OS in a browser in a OS isn't that revolutionary. Cloud Gaming demonstrated this decades ago.

Something doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be a good product. They don’t claim it’s a research result!

>Cloud Gaming demonstrated this decades ago.

What cloudd gaming service existed devades ago?

OnLive existed in 2009

> I open an app and it's transparently run from a remote server

Windows Server has a feature like that called RemoteApp, it's pretty cool!

That's an easy task with xorg based desktop environments, it's more performant as well

Its more like AWS Workspace. RDP is just a client/server software - someone needs to setup VMs somewhere, ensure files are saved to a network share, install applications on them, give you the IP address etc. Workspace and similar solutions abstract a lot of that away.

As chrisseaton said, this is the exact response users on this very forum had to both Dropbox at its launch ("it's just rsync, why would anyone use it?") and Slack ("it's just IRC, why would anyone use it?"). This is a poor mindset to take when it's clearly not targeted at you. It's for businesses and more casual users who don't want to deal with full local installs, and that userbase is far larger than the HN crowd.

Aaaand there we are: The days of a dumb terminal hooked up to a Mainframe are back again

Some big corporations are using it right now, they will not notice the change. Especially often in retail and banks.

I among them using a VM over Citrix as my "work machine". Other than being under powered (typical one size fits all) it is _wonderful_. Always logged in with everything up and available. Sign my company up.

Anyone else thinks that "Zero Trust" is a really bad choice of words for what it is supposed to actually mean?

It meant not having network trust when Google/BeyondCorp made the concept popular, seems fine?

Years ago before Oracle swallowed Sun Microsystems, Sun's motto was "The network is the computer." MS could use "The cloud is the computer" now!

The world now uses a universal ^Java.*? virtual machine and a smarter windowing server which does not require pushing images over the wire. Thin clients are slowly but surely becoming the norm. Companies rent out computing power by the hour. x86 is declining. Microsoft is embracing Unix.

Have we been cursed by the ghost of Sun Microsystems?

I always think SUN was too early. I find chromeos to be the successor to their intent with Google actually even occupying their buildings today.

This seems like a natural product to come out of MS's cloud strategy. Especially considering the cloud gaming they're building with Xbox Game Pass. Also notable that it's at the same time they decided to turn a Windows 10 upgrade into Windows 11.

Cloud PC: when you absolutely positively want your workstation to be just as oversubscribed as your servers.

Is the cloud to butt extension still a thing? Seems really appropriate here.

It looks like this is just an RDP-style solution which is disappointing, it would be really interesting if things still ran locally but everything - apps and data - were synced in real time to the cloud, allowing you to login anywhere on any Windows PC and get all your stuff, without worrying about subsequent users of that hardware from seeing it once you logged out.

That would be pretty amazing, but it looks like it's just all running in the cloud.

Vscode Remote strikes a very good balance IMO. The client running completely locally with a server running on the remote machine.

So it is a client-server app? Aren't clients always running completely locally and the server always running remotely? Not trying to be smart, I would like to understand where the line is for vscode remote? What is running remotely (on the server) exactly?

Yes, my statement does sound tautological.

In vscode a full copy of the vscode backend runs on the remote machine. All running of tests, running the app, type checking and Intellisense, etc. all run on the remote machine. But the UI/client runs on my machine. The result is a very seamless native feeling experience, much more so than RDP or Citrix or any other display forwarding technology I've used.

My claim is that client/server applications actually work very well and much better than a "streaming desktop experience".

Sounds like one could sort of make it with KVM+DRBD or perhaps zfs send/receive

I wonder if native apps will regain some of their lost popularity if the whole OS and app itself can just be streamed to any device.

Only if developers want to build and distribute native apps. I don't see why they would change their attitude. Web apps are basically multiplatform and updated on the server.

Turning on my PC to boot into an OS to open a web browser to turn on a virtual PC to start an OS to open a web browser.

And Citrix VDI sites in corporate businesses all over the world suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

My company just shut down citrix in favor of Azure VDI. Seems Microsoft is competing on price. And I have to admit the user experience is a tad better.

OSception. Your OS runs a browser and your browser runs a OS. Proves the point as to how important browsers truly are.

Sorry, web developer, but you are wrong. Half of this is backed by libvirt/kvm/hyper-v and protocols like RDP and VNC/Spice.

The Web it's just reimplementing the clients, badly, requiring twice the requeriments.

I kinda do this already. I have a "server" machine running zerotier. Then, anywhere I can take a device, plop zerotier and rdp right in.

Its only limited to "100Mbps" but rdp is native like even at a fraction of that speed.

I have around a dozen people remoting into this server and do 8 hours shifts for the last two years now.

Microsoft now wants to be "server" in this case. Rest is the exact same thing except by doing windows 365 cloud PC, you are now giving ownership of your software, files stuff over to micrsoft who can hold it for ransom or outright ban you for stuff like "user from Iran signed in like github did some time ago" or "this govt wants data of this journalist. Here is your court order. Like india does right now. "

I cannot live with that. Maybe a lot of people might but not me.

I get that none of us want this stuff. No end user wants any of this stuff. It's for big business, who get to tell their employees what computers to use and how, despite their employees also not wanting this stuff. It's where the money is, so it's not going away.

How it's different than a VM running in their cloud?

It's a VM running in their cloud.

Just a bit nicer to use (productized), which is important.

yup, even though this has been done forever, you could always setup a computer at home and RDP to it. Most products I have seen have targeted corporations with IT departments that could set stuff up. This seems more like a easy to use personal/small company product based on their Azure infrastructure. Niche imo. And not that bad tbh, I've have had a couple of instances where I've had to use a Windows for something, and having a quick deploy VM would have been nice. Setting up VMs locally is a pain, so is deploying VMs on many cloud providers.

We all remember the famous Dropbox comment [0], right? I think the same holds true in this case. Even when there's an IT department to set things up, that still takes effort to set up and maintain. If it's available as a product, easily used and with a support hotline, I can even see medium sized businesses using it - depending on the price, of course.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

They say it’s appropriate for industrial designers. I wonder if that implies GPU support. The only use case I have for windows is a few steam games that don’t run on Linux. Make the setup seamless, and charge by the hour, and… maybe?

Lipstick on a pig

Haha yeah I was just sending instructions to a team today on how to set up some software and I wasn't sure what OS they were using. I wrote up the linux and mac instructions and when I got to windows i had to think for a minute if i really thought there was a chance someone would have a windows machine. I ended up including instructions, but I know that at least for (edit: modern) development stuff, windows is just an afterthought, nobody is really expecting people to be using it.

In this case I mean, VDI has existed for literally decades now. Are we supposed to congratulate MS for doing what every other cloud provider did more than 10 years ago?

It hasn’t been a very convenient solution though. I suspect the key here is the managing of everyone’s data and machine in the company. Instant-on personal clients with the company directory would be great for administration.

I assure you huge number of developers do their development stuff on windows. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was a majority (given how big the majority is for windows on the desktop overall).

Edit: indeed after some quick googling it does indeed seem to be the clear majority desktop OS even for people identifying as software developers, for example in the StackOverflow developer survey.

> at least for (edit: modern) development stuff, windows is just an afterthought, nobody is really expecting people to be using it.

What? I don't know where you are from but in Europe (read: outside US) I estimate that over 90% of software development is done on MS stack.

As many have indicated: it is not that this is possible or even unique, it is simply the price at which it can be achieved. Not including this in the announcement misses the only point that anyone cares about.

Will be interesting to see pricing - I wonder if there will be any kind of discount for orgs that already have most of their people on Windows, or indeed for employees using their own Windows devices.

I could see this being a big security bonus for a lot of companies, especially with the shift to WFH - I'd think a lot of companies had to rather hastily deploy VPNs etc, and that's not the kind of infrastructure you want to rush...

Also, I can imagine some unscrupulous companies seeing this as a money-saving exercise, forcing employees to use their own devices instead of providing one for them.

Leaks indicates it will be starting at $59.99/month

This way too expansive, I'm not sure that'll find a place in IT places, most professionals already know how to work with a VPS..

Unless some tech illiterates management makes decisions, I fail to see how this can be successful

Considering there is probably going to be discounts for large integrators, and that price adds up to $720/year - if this actually does replace upgrade costs - it might be worth to some companies.

$720.00 per year including the hardware and availability everywhere there is an internet connection. It's $2,160.00 in 3 years, a professional level laptop. The local device could be very cheap and light.

I wonder what are the hardware and bandwidth requirements.

If you need 4k60 or more, then your local device can't be a potato either.

The only reason I use Windows at all is that it's the best way to run the applications I need as close to the metal as possible. If it wasn't for that, I'd be in Linux or some virtualization flavor. If all the applications I use daily were available natively on some other OS I'd switch tomorrow.

Given that, I don't really see the utility in this for me, and it makes my nervous about what I DO depend on Windows for. I feel like MS is gonna try to push us all into this cloud model, which is 100% the opposite of what I need from Windows.

It's very much not a product for you. It's aimed at large corporate IT departments that want a painless way to provision equipment and deal with all the malware their employees inevitably download.

A feature I think would make this a killer app is to be a truly hybrid experience. Similar to how Parallels can make it seem like apps from a Windows VM are running as OS-X apps, MS needs to create a more seamless experience.

How great would it be to just have a shortcut link to open Photoshop on my powerful high memory optimized Cloud VM and other apps from my corporate provided VM.

Secondly, when I hit Start I should be able to tab through my connected VMs, or see an aggregate list of all start menus of all my VMs and local PC.

This was of course the logical end of the cloud expansion. Why pay for users to have a beefy machine when all their apps live in the cloud anyway.

Also now it is so much easier to enforce policies prevent users from installing things they shouldn't, recover lost data, etc.

Of course it brings with it all the same issues. Hopefully we can figure out how to move back to private computing before they make all endpoints dumb terminals.

this will be easy money for microsoft. we're now back to the day of thin clients. with a full OS streaming from the cloud, Enterprises can reduce costs. And with 0 trust, it means data is more secure either ways i.e prevent future hacks due to incompetent IT policies. However, as a consumer I get worried about how ownership is slowly being chipped away. slowly we're renting everything.

slowly? Seems to be moving quickly to rent a model in just about everything :/

Outsourcing something that is not a core competency (like running virtual machines) is cheaper and safer for all but the largest organisations.

Well, then all is going according to plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBBxWtKKQiA

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the...

Thank you, but nope.

I had recently a webinar from Siemens Automation, where they talked about such licence models, just everything in the cloud. I asked myself how they would do that, but now it looks much more clear I guess.

But I have to agree with you. Thank you, but nope.

This is what we were telling Adobe when they first announced CC.

Finally! 7$ a month ... make it the same price as netflix subscription but with access to xbox live and windows 365

RE: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2867542/microsoft-tout...

AWS Workspaces is actually pretty good too.

It's a different license. There's no way VM could cost $7/month. More like $70/month/

I think they could do it.

That article is from 2015.

Yes. They've talked about Windows As A Service for a while.

I'm actually looking forward to this, making it more mainstream than RDP and better pricing?

Buying my last laptop I'm torn between gaming = GPU vs. noise & form factor = on the go vs. CPU/RAM for local developing/PowerBI. For gaming the future looks god with streaming.

Also I'd prefer to keep business and private machine apart, but still have them both always with me, no matter the device.

As someone who is sometimes forced to use Azure and Sharepoint I can hardly imagine something worse than Microsoft 365.

Oh no! What is you doing?

This looks interesting on second thought. A good way to consolidate workplace systems for low-bandwidth display applications where consistently low latency is not a big concern.

I hope that this is not the beginning of the next iteration of Windows for the general consumers. I like the OS, and I'd like it to remain on my hard drive.

It's also infinitely easier for Microsoft to improve and protect world security by controlling all network data going into and coming out of a device. A framebuffer delivered to your monitor means Microsoft can run all its advanced threat detection magic with no regard for what network a monitor is plugged into.

The millions of unprotected businesses of the world can skip zerotrust / firewall / antivirus / network redesigns and jump right to pc-aas with azure-ad.

For all the "I dont want big brother controlling my device" there should be an equal "I dont want teams with millions of dollars carelessly building infrastructure that can be weaponized against society."

It is also a "say good bye to your data". Next MS innovation: backups in the cloud.

Ah, yes, dumb terminals. They are like 50 years late.

It can really come down to a business case. What are the chances or risk of a virus or ransomware occurring? And what are the potential costs and challenges of dealing with that? If I can reduce my exposure to information, legal and operational risk, which is hard to directly quantify and yet is ever-present, plus some anticipated reduction in operating expenses, it can start to look good for a large portion of businesses with office operations.

Which is exactly why "but mah data" is less about privacy in an enterprise world, and more about standardization and portability. Owning your data in the enterprise context means being able to ship it around it a reusable way, and not some proprietary Microsoft blob that will never work anywhere else, or having it scattered across a million APIs with a million different schemas with zero tools to grab it all at once.

The risk is less Microsoft ever reading your data and more never being able to divorce them at a later date. Entrenchment.

Those are problems that exist similarly whether youre in the cloud, or something on prem that you bought, built or customized.

Conversely, for anyco without good hygiene, standardized process, discipline, and respect for keeping things tidy, out of the box cloud process can be a godsend. It's not just minimization of risk, but built in architecture and integration and flow, which in and of itself can be more important than product features.

No. You get a touch screen with a WPU. A Web Processing Unit, it will authenticate you as a valid subscriber and let you access the clouds CPU/GPU.

You own nothin, you're a user.

2030.

Microsoft is a B2B corporation. Anything B2C only exists to prevent competition from rising up to take on it's real cash cow.

this + a future Surface Duo == winner of convergence for the masses.

I've been (incorrectly) predicting forever that Microsoft would start selling Chromebook-like devices which used remote Windows like this, or even an inexpensive consumer tablet that runs mostly in the cloud. They've literally been working on this stuff since the Mira tablet in 2002.

Huh... So this comes only now? I must admit, I thought they'd already had this for years.

Oh well, at least now we know why they've dropped the "Windows as a service" moniker for Windows 11: Because this is Windows as a service.

With today's broadband standards being so slow, this is a nightmare waiting to happen.

Much of the world has high speed internet now. Almost every city has gbit or faster. Why hold back tech from people who can use it? This stuff will also drive demand for faster internet.

What cities have gbit upload speeds on a consumer plan?

You don't need fast upload for this. You are just sending keyboard and mouse controls up and getting some kind of video feed down.

Yeah... Makes sense for corporate use. But for a personal computer - fuuuuuuuuck no.

Perfect for my use case where I need the occasional place to test random Windows stuff or temporarily need a computer with a different IP. I have a Win 10 eval VM here at home but I don’t really like maintaining it.

I am assuming this will be aiming for Enterprise niche in certain segment?

Or will Microsoft start selling Windows OS that only does Remote Connection to OEMs? i.e Only used for Windows 365? Basically Microsoft version of ChromeOS.

Interesting, this will allow Microsoft to still run Windows AND all existing Windows software on ARM. It seems like the way of least resistance to get ready for the incoming ARM onslaught.

It will be available at Aug 2nd. No price info.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365

This technology needs to be something one can enable on their own PCs, and reach via their own private VPN. It should not require using a public cloud such as Azure.

or Meet Webtops A Linux Desktop Environment In Your Browser

https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2021-05-05-meet-webtops-a-li...

https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-webtop

This is a much bigger deal than HN realizes. The PC experience hasn't changed much in a long time. The future of windows in the corporate world is cloud first and access to your 'session' and files from any device. This is to the corporate world what chromebooks were to schools. Yes RDP/Network drives exist but if you have to train users it's a non starter for mass adoption. No one wants to explain to the computer illiterate the difference between local files and shared drives.

Back when people were predicting Microsoft porting Windows to the new ARM based Macs I thought this was a much more likely solution.

Windows already runs on ARM.

Where can I buy a copy of Windows for my new MacBook Air?

Right here: https://www.theverge.com/22383598/parallels-desktop-mac-wind...

> Parallels is releasing an update to its Desktop virtual machine software that allows M1 Mac owners to install Windows 10 on Arm. Parallels Desktop 16.5 now includes the necessary native support to run the Arm version of Windows on M1 chips, following Apple’s decision not to support Boot Camp on M1 Macs.

I'm very sorry that you bought a computer that doesn't support any third-party operating systems, by design. (Apple won't support boot-camp on it.) If this feature is important to you, perhaps you should return your M1, and go to Best Buy and purchase one of the many other choices.

From the article:

"The main drawback is that you’ll need to run a preview version of Windows to make this all work. Microsoft only currently licenses the Arm version of Windows 10 to PC makers, so there’s no official way to buy a copy yet."

Brought to you from the creators of Teams

And SharePoint!

And Skype for Business.

And EDLIN.

But this could (theoretically) finally fix the performance/battery issues by having a dedicated cloud VM that only runs Teams! :)

This is utter trash. Microsoft should go back to selling products instead of selling subscriptions.

It's all about that MRR figure.

Hope it will be shipped without IE11 inside, just Edge. Otherwise IE11 will never die.

Interesting to see if Mighty App sees this as competition to their Chrome streaming.

Gah, was waiting for this to come up: now whenever I hear about some kind of 'app streaming' or whatever I just think of smug Mighty bro

I guess Microsoft is giving up on porting full Word, Excel, etc to the browser...

Is this just Active Directory over the internet, or am I misreading the post?

No this has nothing to do with AD. Off-prem cloud AD is already being done via Azure.

If you think about a big microsoft based corp who are now using azure - they have an on prem AD and are using all kinds of AD magic to administrate their real hardware. Then they have an Azure AD that manages their servers and other resources and controls access to all their cloud stuff. Now a local domain user needs rights on some cloud asset with single sign on - consulting around I've seen company sholve this a bunch of ways and it's a mess.

So if one thing MS are doing here is adding an elegant official way of doing that - that would be nice.

> This approach creates a fully new personal computing category, specifically for the hybrid world: the Cloud PC.

Cloud computing is the antithesis of "personal computing", you lying asshole.

The idea is that your "personal" computer at work follows you from the office to a laptop, not that this is for consumers (I hope).

BYO image, too. This is being overlooked.

On the plus side, this might force some ISPs to get their shit together and add some nines to their 90% uptime.

Linux should have got the lead here, what happened?

Lack of app ecosystem in Linux? i think that's the problem..

X11 forwarding is slow and shitty and Wayland didn't acknowedlege the value of remote desktop for far too long.

Also remote desktop is about way more than mouse, keyboard and graphics.these days people expect usb device forwarding and audio too

Does Wayland even have a good remoting solution today?

No, because like everything else it has to be done by the compositor.

I’m not going to pretend it’s super simple to make Linux work in a modern VDI environment, there’s a lot that needs to be done to match what Citrix, VMWare and Microsoft do - but it kind of shows that nobody actually thinks Linux on the desktop makes sense when nobody has even tried to make it work.

I use Xpra to remote individual apps. It's not as good as RDP, but better than other remoting solutions like forwarding X11 over ssh, Nomachine or X2go.

Any pricing details?

It's free just like win 10. You can even encrypt your data (they have the key). Be sure to read the EULA before you use it.

If I read the EULA first I might still be reading it by the time the product is discontinued.

ssh -x

All your data are belong to us.

I guess the ms devs finally figured out that their powershells can run ssh

Over my dead body.

Congratulations, you have invented Citrix.

You're being unnecessarily snarky for some reason.

They aren't suggesting that this is new technology, but I do believe it's a new product - I don't think I've been able to sign up for a service with this kind of convenience before.

lol, have you overseen a Citrix deployment?!

Congratulations, you have eliminated a middleman.

Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) was licensed from Citrix in 1998. And that was developed with Citrix licensing OS/2 from Microsoft and then Microsoft investing in them after switching to Windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrix_Systems#Rise_in_popular...

Most dystopian shit I've seen in a while.

This will be significantly interesting to follow from a revenue generation perspective and how they are going to abuse users and then ask for forgiveness. Monthly billing will need a valid payment instrument "on file" and over time they are certain to nickel and dime users for features. So you want to print on your home printer from your M$ cloud hosted Window$ in$tance, that will be 5¢ per page or we can send it to your local Staples* for pickup at 1¢ per page. A microtransaction chargeback for a failed print from a paper jam will be interesting to review. This is certain to go in the direction most know it will and has the potential to redefine the term pay-per-click. Just look past the security implications and the die-sasters that are certain to occur from making Windows available from anywhere "easy" for the non-technical crowd.

*By agreeing to any savings through our third party vendors you are hereby informed that we SharE aLL your information with these vendors in order to recoup the savings extended to you.

Using $ with Msft feels kitschy and unnecessary. No one reading and grokking the reason for $ over S doesn’t know that Microsoft isn’t a money printing company that does mostly whatever they can to make money.

Do you think Staples is any different? Yet the S there was not replaced.

I love it, as a throwback to the 90s.

Also bring back the Bill Gates Borg image please.

Coincidentally the 90s was when (I imagine) most of us were kids. I'd rather not have my dumb memes, Slashdot copypastas and the like guide our technical discourse today.

Somebody doesn't like the feel of hot grits down their pants...

This one, presumably?

https://driftboatdave.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/112715_214...

A chargeback is a relatively expensive process for all parties probably cost wise in excess of a dollar if they automate most of it (albeit merchants get charged anything from $12-$30, if not their bundle pricing and add-ons have included it).. in these scenarios I believe the card bank just write it off, say a 50cent print run

They will charge your account which you pay monthly any refunds will go back to the account.

I mean I pay for iCloud it’s like $2/mo. It doesn’t have to be sketchy and for their flagship consumer services MS isn’t like even a tenth as bad as you’re describing.

This is a rebranding of Azure Virtual Desktop. It is intended for companies and Azure already requires a payment method on file or a purchase order arrangement. It is not going to have charges for printing or anything else. It's intended for IT departments that need an easier way to start using VDI and or prosumers who want it for whatever reason. It definitely won't share data with random companies otherwise no regulated business will be able to use it.

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