The Windows desktop is dying
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
In my own job, I straddle cloud-based and local machine-based software. Overwhelmingly, the cloud-based software is slow to the extent that it removes at least 40 points of IQ and offsets a decade of experience. The intellect and mental speed I have spent a lifetime building are simply washed away by latency that shuts my mind down, effectively turning me into a ninth-grader. Sure the company pays me as if I continue to generate output becoming of my generous salary. But I maintain the illusion simply by spending many hours on weekends with copious amounts of coffee and, at times, gin, doing work on cloud-based software that, on the "outdated" local software, used to take minutes.
Cloud software is among the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the American consumer.
Many of these cloud applications choose fragmentary architectures with data sprinkled across many discreet servers that are milliseconds or tens of milliseconds away from each other, resulting in significant delays compared to doing these blocking operations against a local database.
Cloud native isn't always the right choice, sometimes CRUD apps should have a local database just for the responsiveness benefits.
Once ISPs cohost, or get in on the game themselves, we’re set!
Has latency really improved that much lately? At least for gaming latency has been more or less constant for me over the last ~10 years or so.
And if the server is in the same city or quite close to you I think it’s already possible but possibly not that useful.
It is also how it worked 20-10 years ago: it was called Terminal Services.
And then it was neglected because next shiny thing: VDI.
The thing is, one big server for a hundred office users doesn't cost much, because they are sharing the RAM. But with VDI you need at least 100 x 4Gb memory and that means you need way more than one server. And some SAN, because only SAN with fast drive can survive the morning boot storm. Oh, by the way, here are two FC SAN switches for your HA storage fabric, because you really want paths to the SAN be redundant.
But anyway, local installs are not bringing revenue constantly. But renting the services do. This was perfectly clear with AzureAD and Exchange 365.
But the surfeit of stupendously powerful white box server platforms and the remarkably efficient way that a terminal server conserves memory usage across sessions compared to containers or vdi or anything else, absolutely outperforms almost every other solution in the SMB space, in terms of how each support engineer can scale to 100 or more end users across a half dozen completely unrelated organizations. I'm surprised how underrepresented this business model is these days.
VARs are living on %% of the sale.
> Not dead yet
Yep, but only yet.
Because they both suck, either side “winning” is worse than staying in the middle. But we only like pendulum swinging in this industry so nobody stops as the bottom of the arc.
OTOH, you could log off from one terminal and go to any other terminal (maybe in a different country) and continue to work right where you left.
If the environment is designed for that, it's not only doable, but practical.
I could see a use case where people don't want / can spend to much money on hardware. But even then, hardware is still required and I can't see where a subscription would help here.
I can work in my office at my workstation. I can walk out to the kitchen and sit down with my laptop and open the lid and be _exactly_ where I just was. I can move across the country and work from my laptop, a friend’s computer, a library, or anything else I run across along the way. My house can burn down and I can go to an electronics store and buy a new laptop and continue typing in the middle of the line where I left off when the smoke detector started beeping and I ran out of the house.
Separating the device I’m using from the work I’m doing makes the friction to move between devices near zero or zero.
Most of my work _is_ done from my desktop. The bulk of the remainder is done from my laptop. For that alone I find enough advantage to keep doing it. Zero context lost bouncing around.
But when I _was_ moving across the country, it was certainly nice not having my ability to earn an income any given day tied to a single device. When I was effectively homeless in my month-long move and staying with family at one point I did end up using their computer a couple times. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were okay with it.
Yes, if I'm somewhere without internet I can't get a lot done. But that's true whether I'm running programs locally or remotely.
Based on the number of people that show up on HN every time GitHub/GitLab/etc go down, I don't think I have any unusual dependencies that nobody else does.
Why not Chromebooks + web apps if you need some client-side hardware anyway?
Some companies are married to Microsoft Office, Exchange, and ShamePoint.
At the university we had DG/UX, Solaris and eventually Red-Hat Linux, with a mix of classical phosphor and green terminals, PC and classical Macs (LC models).
At Nokia and CERN we used to develop on UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, Scientific Linux) servers, PC and Macs were only used for Office and as thin clients for the R&D servers.
And then we moved into Citrix, RDP and Terminal Services for Windows development, so it has been with us all along.
That's just never going to be acceptable for me. If the day ever comes there's no choice, I guess I'll keep using the last version that still works 100% locally. I already resent the extra time I have to spend keeping Win10 and Firefox usable against the constant creep of enshittification (<-- a great term by Cory Doctorow), so at least that'll stop when I jump off the upgrade train.
It got so bad that a couple of import statements in my jupyrr notebook cell took a minute to finish executing. It used to take barely a couple of seconds just yesterday. If resetting does not work I'll have to try a fresh install. If that doesn't work too it's Linux for me I guess.
The only reason I use windows is cause I play games and I am pretty used to it's UI. Guess it's almost the end of the road with this OS for me
Depending on the game, there's still that classic linux hassle (aka series of hacks you can impress your friends with) that are needed to get some games working, but the number of games supported and working without the hassle is honestly surprisingly good imo. The typical ones that you can expect to cause a headache are the always on live service games with heavy handed DRM.
If the times comes, please avoid Ubuntu - Nobara (Fedora + gaming tweaks) might be a good choice for you. Debian would be another good choice as a general purpose desktop, and many Ubuntu tutorials/Q&A would work just fine with it. Garuda Arch-based if you want street cred, and uses KDE by default.
The most recent time, I was shocked how good it was (with Steam & Proton). The only games I found that didn't work were due to DRM and anti-cheating software.
>Now my laptop is acting really slow even though no process is hogging CPU or ram
Have you rebooted?
Is it thermal throttling?
Linux has always been lackluster on the Desktop - fragmented, lacking features, lacking important applications, etc - and MacOS is attached to overpriced mediocrity.
Honestly, I would agree with that 10 years ago but not anymore.
The we-yfication of clients applications and Electron (ironically) did a lot of good here.
These are numbers pulled out of my Hat, but I would say out of my experience that around:
- 90% of proprietary applications around nowadays are just WebApp or Electron Apps that will just run fine under Linux
- 5-7% are old Win32 apps that will just run like a charm under Wine (ironically, sometimes better than under the last windows version)
- 3-5% are the problematic ones. They are often Microsoft applications (Office365, Teams) or Oracle applications.
The most problematic one I do find currently is Office 365 that never runs properly under Wine (probably on purpose).
Even the game situation improved tremendously with the arrival of Proton.
And that's totally expected. Unlike WSL1, where a terrible OS pretends to be a good one, a vastly superior OS should have no issue pretending to be an inferior one.
Perhaps disgust, but Wine is not sentient just yet.
My personal experience with both WSL1 and Cygwin, which offer a Linux-like varnish on top of a Windows environment, is that mapping Linux filesystem semantics on top of NTFS result in a sizeable performance hit.
Not enough to make them unusable, of course, but enough perceive.
When Wine does the same, mapping NTFS semantics on top of ext4, there is no such hit - on the contrary, if feels faster.
I'm not a mac user but calling the M1/M2 macbooks overpriced mediocrity is simply ridiculous and shows how out of touch you are.
* https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/displaylink-dual-displa...
*** https://github.com/dado3212/spaces-renamer
**** https://contexts.co/
It also requires me to be able to install arbitrary software on my Mac, which has not been the case at most employers I've worked for.
.....or I could buy a Windows machine and get that all out of the box.
My work laptop is a Mac. My work workstation is a Linux (Gnome) machine. My personal workstation is a Windows 10 machine (not upgrading until they bring back side taskbar). I own and regularly use a Chromebook. I am familiar with all the major desktop environments and OS X is my least favorite.
M1/M2 are hardware. MacOS is software. As far as operating systems go MacOS is very much mediocre.
The comment he was replying to saids that MacOS is "attached to overpriced mediocrity". It seems pretty clear that is talking about hardware.
-Relatively secure
-Game changing integration with my other Apple products (NOBODY else does this)
-Stays out of my way for the most part
-Runs important commercial software like Office365 natively
-UNIX shell right out of the box
-Homebrew is a decent package manager and easy to install
-Emacs key binds for text entry fields across the entire OS
-It's a little thing, but the animations and sounds make it kind of fun to use
It's a bit inflexible, and the UNIX layer could use some love and modernization, I'll give you that, but once you learn to work within the paradigm, I think it's actually a really good OS.
Oh, and you definitely need to install something like Rectangle to get window snapping, I can't go without that after using it on Windows and Linux, but that's easy enough to fix.
Eh, not really. They do it really well and present it very nicely, but mostly sherlocked and not at all unique. Also, it really stumbles once you throw any non-apple stuff in.
LTspice, Maxima and O365 are horrible on macos.
Edit: as some of the sibling comments are saying, maybe parent was talking about Mac OS itself, not the hardware. Some things in Mac OS leave a lot to be desired IME, e.g. windows tiling (can be solved by installing something like Rectangle but really it should be part of the OS) https://rectangleapp.com/
The desktop Linux environment has never been worse. With Wayland and High DPI, you're kinda forced to use KDE or Gnome to have a smooth experience. Other desktop environments are either bad at Wayland or bad at DPI scaling. But even the two poster children for Linux desktop environments are plagued by issues. Those are always minor or temporary but sometimes breaking something critically. I've had web pages just put KDE into a loop. Always crashing and then restarting. And that was weeks ago. And this happens every time. The install I had before that with gnome made every DPI scales app blurry. This simply does not happen on Windows.
Regqrsing Macs: I don't trust Apple to not do something stupid either but also at least until the 15 inch MacBook air you either lived with 13 inch or you paid a lot more. Need more than one external screen? That's mbp for you. More ports? Mbp. Better GPU? Mbp. And then we really quickly get into a price range where you are comparing the most expensive Windows machines (which actually have some build quality) vs a mid range 14 inch mbp.
I like the arm machines but I'm personally not convinced that anything past the base model is actually worth it. Especially outside of the high CoL areas of the US. Like, if you compare rent payment per week to the cost of the machine, you can totally see why Macs sell so well in US urban centers.
Adobe anything, Autodesk anything, stuff like that... are those still Desktop apps? They aren't on 90% of the desktops out there. Should the 10% be called Workstations?
Perhaps the "important applications" are MS Office? Or some other MS product forced on you by an employer. But that world seems so... archaic.
After many years of enlightenment16 on underpowered (scavenged) computers KDE Plasma became my desktop of choice. It still is.
Nowadays it's a choice between a browser and an editor for all but multimedia editing and gaming. So emacs and firefox work really well. I still use a desktop environnment for convenient interface with system settings such as wifi networks, window placement, power management and the like, but otherwise KDE disappears into the background as it should.
But, as I explore the wonders of NixOS these settings are more and more becoming declaratively controlled by a simple collection of assci files, and it's wonderful. As soon as emacs becomes multithreaded I'm switching to EXWM. And then my desktop enviroment will be fully subsumed.
I reckon this combination will eventually become ubiquitous as everyone will become some kind of a programmer, and Richard Stallman will be proven correct.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft, will suddenly realise there is no lunch and everyone else will eat computation more happily and healthily. Though in the long run Guix will be more nutritious than NixOS.
The desktop metaphor will become a kind of ancient poetry we explore for semiotic curiosities as we forge new pathways for collaborative thinking.
And we will always deploy the lambda calculus on the Von Neumann architecture, even when quantum computing is ubiquitous, because we need metaphors, because computing will always be a kind of poetry.
So long, and thanks for all the shells.
I had the unfortunate pleasure of working on remote windows at { large financial institution }. It was a nightmare. Yes they got a huge immediate cash savings on hardware, but at the cost of worker productivity.
The response time from keypress to response was literally like I was in 1992 working with a dialup connection to a terminal server.
Oh, also the executives got their own laptops, so they didn't dogfood their own solution.
Things like this happen when the person who signs the check is not the person who actually uses the software. Also, no matter the resulting clusterfuck, the project is always successful.
You'll have a lot of thin-client/remote environments used for places where the primary metric is manageability. Think of how schools love Chromebooks, and places like call centres that simply want users in a bolted down kiosk mode. They don't care if the experience is miserable, but they like the idea that nobody's reading Lemmy.
It's going to be a huge hairball for the more advanced user market. Your engineering and graphics and big-data people are going to need special tools with likely complex licensing and setup hassles, mitigating the manageability benefits, and you know there will be a point where hiring a big cloud machine gets pricier than buying an actual workstation.
I wonder if some vendors will instead buy into a reduced-version of the concept for distribution though-- instead of ever getting a copy of the bits for AutoCAD or Photoshop, you just get a RDP login to a big machine running it, almost reinventing the X11 paradigm.
Then COVID hit and all of a sudden we all worked from home exactly the same way. It was a wow moment of how prepared we were comparing to everyone.
Meanwhile the managers, (I only assume), got huge bonuses out of it.
Yes, it is never as good as native, but it's not that bad if done properly.
Citrix/RDP farm should NEVER be used for cost savings. It is for data control. But bean counters think it saves costs... and user experience suffer.
First phase of a tech rollout gives overly generous hardware, because the end user needs to be won over. Then comes right-sizing because it makes economic sense, and we know things are too generous. Then end users get decoupled from bean counters and the provisioning gets done by a third party corporation, so feedback cycles are broken. At that point, the race to the bottom starts.
I've seen people declare: We provision to the satisfaction of the customer. Which means: If you don't do the effort to complain, all is well. The results is the best people leave, as they won't deal with that. The middlings complain, bothering their managers, so they get labelled troublemakers and are oushed out. The yes men stay and praise the situation. The 9to5ers stay and get paid no matter what, so who cares if msword's text appear multiple seconds after you typed it.
But the TCO of employee connectivity is not merely "the device"
It's everything else that goes into it
Want a standard developer environment? Create an appropriate VDI instance
Want a standard CAD environment? Create an appropriate VDI instance
Want a standard xyz environment? Create an appropriate VDI instance
Then, based on the user role (at the moment of login), spin-up and connect to the proper image
This also allows someone who does two jobs to connect to multiple VDIs based off work needs, and do the 'proper' work on each one
Sure some of this is about data governance ... but most is about enabling end users to be as productive as possible
Updates? Done offline in offhours just to the master image(s)
New version of $OS$ needs to be deployed/trialed? Build/update one image at a time, verify, then push out as the new Golden Master
That CAD program that needs 16 threads for someone to be productive? But if the cluster is oversubscribed you'll get maybe 30% of the performance you need.
Even even over a paltry 15mbit consumer grade cable internet uplink it is possible to play full screen YouTube videos in high def over plain vanilla RDP version 8, without even getting into any of the (often quite flaky and at this point highly redundant) Citrix enhancements.
Well.. for starters, it's fast only if your datacenter where the RDP/Citrix server is close to the terminals. If ping time is 100ms round trip, then yeah, it's gonna be slow, and it's going to begin to resemble dial-up.
> ... or criminally oversubscribed
Yes! and people got bonuses out of it!
I was apprehensive at first but actually it's pretty great. I can just turn off my computer at the office and turn it back on at home and get back the same session. I can move to any stations in the building without issues.
I don't need to carry around a laptop so I can go to the office with just my keycard and my wallet. I can buy whatever device I want for myself and use it for work too without actually mixing personal and work related computing at all.
I've heard it costs more than buying new laptops to everyone every year.
If only "costs more" if you look at a pure dollar cost of the VDI infra vs the pure cost of a laptop - yeah, it might be more than a couple hundred $$ for for the infra to manage it every month vs a new $2400 laptop every year
But updates, preferences, personalization, setup time, etc is all handled - on a schedule, in a unified manner, and uniformly for everyone
Except ... it does "save costs"
Allowing BYOD (or eve just supplying a 'basic' device) and connecting only through Horizon (or whatever client of choice you prefer) is a huge savings over managing fleets of laptops, desktops, etc - all with different support cycles, specs, etc
All your management is focused on just one layer - the virtual desktop (and its supporting infrastructure)
Everything else is noise
Think about it. High-end CAM software (MasterCAM) can easily cost $10K or more per seat. If you want modules for, say, a 5-axis, it can be as much as $35K per seat. SolidWorks will happily charge $4K per seat, minimum. And of course, people complain when their SolidWorks license doesn't work well on their Integrated Graphics and Core i3-4100U; or whatever old systems they are trying to run it on. So much work to fix all the bugs and quirks with old hardware...
... or, just announce that SolidWorks or MasterCAM now run online. With good cloud-based hardware. The subscription makes it more universally affordable, provides service revenue the investors love, there's no more energy spent supporting old hardware and low-end systems, and piracy is dead which the investors also love.
You're not going to be running too many Electron-based apps with 8GB, or any with 4GB.
Is there a gaming edition that actually uses local hardware? We've seen time and time again that the latency is a non-starter for gaming, and Windows is strong there. If MS wants to throw that out, so be it. Save us, Gaben!
If I had to buy a pc and maintain it for employees and then pay $350/year that’s not economical.
I think you’re more likely to have some docking station you slide your phone into for a big monitor and keyboard and then just use the browser.
That and the UX is going to be horrible.
what I had on my pretty mediocre gaming machine back in 2008
Xbox
Moreover, having lived through the thin client experiment of the mid 2000s, I can't see VDI ever taking off in the short term, especially at Microsoft's price point either. M365 is brilliant in many ways, but it serves to augment the Windows desktop today, not replace it.
Local first, remote sync is fine.
Remote first is not!
I don't feel like almost ANYONE in my life used Windows as a personal PC. Every single friend/partner I can recall had a Macbook of some sort. I was always jealous because I couldn't afford a Macbook I always had some old Thinkpad. The first macbook I ever actually bought was the new M1 max a couple years ago.
I have a Windows 11 desktop with a 4090 rtx in it I use for games once a month. I don't mind or hate Windows. In fact it has the best windows management (pop left/right/up/down) system I've ever used.
I remember everyone going insane for Win 95 but I just don't ever see the actual market now. My last 3-5 jobs everyone but maybe a couple of people in sales had Macbooks..
Spoken like someone who's never experienced KDE. ;)
Let me guess. You live in US, right? Or at least, western countries?
Here in Asia, Africa... the number of macbooks as personal computers is so small. Right here in Vietnam I'm sitting at a coffee shop with about 10 customers with laptops. 9 are windows, and 1 is macbook. At my lab in Korea with about 30 people when I was studying master there, about 3 or 4 of them use macs.
It's a bit funny.
And where I work it's all Thinkpads or Dells :)
Office 365 suite + Windows 11 + Defender EDR/S1/Crowdstrike + Intune or other MDM/RMM like Ninja/PDQ is an excellent stack for productivity, management, and security.
For Mac you need the hardware first, then a google workspace or 365 license, then jamf to manage the fleet + S1/Crowdstrike.
But yes for Desktop use it really shines. PC Gaming too is in a better place than ever. Like 500k is on Steam playing BG3 right now.
A third of my IT department works just to maintain Windows infrastructure for end users.
This is just a virtual workstation product being made available for consumers. It isn’t killing the Windows desktop, it’s offering a solution to someone who needs a cloud thin client.
without connectivity to azure, your terminal wont even be dumb.
If you take it for granted that you want to eschew typical hardware, and deliver experiences over the Internet, is the best way to do that really let someone rent 8GB of RAM in the cloud, and load Chrome and web pages into that cloud ram they rented? and then let the webpages paint in the cloud and draw it for the user over RDP?
This makes sense for Microsoft to use their desktop telemetry investments in the cloud era. But less sense for users doing basic productivity.
Don’t think it should but I built a PC to use this tech and realized Linux wasn’t an option.
It's [effectively] what a Chromebook is
I moved to Linux last year, but had to revert to Windows 10 because of WikidPad glitches. The old (compiled) Windows version works great, but because of breaking changes in WxWindows, all of the dialog boxes are broken in Linux, and there's no old compiled version to revert to. That's the weakness of depending on source code.
Wonder if Microsoft will find ways to double-dip, and transfer portions or sell their user's data to various governments or businesses, as they please for profit.
I still have a few apps that keep me tied to Windows, but it looks like I need to find ways to replace them or move beyond them within the next half a decade.