Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

theregister.com

51 pointstaubek68 comments

This is clickbait. They will remove the Remote Desktop app from the Microsoft Store. They are not removing Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe), which is what most people think of when they hear "Remote Desktop".

That partially the fault of MS.

They have a terrible naming history.

Remote Desktop App is deprecated and gets replaced by Windows App but Remote Desktop Connections aren’t affected.

> They have a terrible naming history.

I just read the entire article being a bit confused and it wasn't until I read here that I realized that the name of the replacement application is "Windows App".

Why?!

Despite best efforts, they couldn't find a worse name.

Windows App? Does that let you install Windows inside of Windows via the App store that most companies block?

Honestly, I didn't even know there was a Remote Desktop app in the Microsoft store until they announced they were removing it. As long as the desktop app remains, I'm fine.

If you look carefully at the link on HN, you will see (theregister.com)

theregister.com has similar relation to facts as The Onion but not as funny

How is Microsoft so consistently terrible at naming things? Is there an internal group who's sole job is to ensure names have conflicting meaning?

Yes. Internally you’d be amazed how many names are clobbered and how hard it is to find anything.

The number of different uses of “subscription” or “container” is something that stood out to me.

marketing >> engineering

'I didnt make the laws of nature, I just follow them' - Thucydides paraphrased

We all know which company/companies are the 'best'(aka worst for society) at marketing. Microsoft is just following their lead.

If they didn't adjust, they would go extinct... (Maybe not given their walled prison)

This isn't a sufficient explanation, because a good marketing team cares about naming things well and most engineering teams are terrible at it. Letting engineering name things is how OpenAI ended up stuck with ChatGPT as a name for their flagship product.

Not just Microsoft. I remember iPlanet directory server... which got renamed to Sun Directory Server, SUN Java System Directory Server, Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition, Java One Directory Server, Oracle Java Directory Server...

I believe Oracle called everything back to iPlanet because customers never used the new names.

I find that Microsoft has the most beautiful/poetic names for some of their products (admittedly the older ones):

Windows

Word

Paint

Excel

Now that you mention it those are good names

I am not sure I like "Windows" as a name for an OS. :D

It makes perfect sense since the operating system is literally Window-centric. (as opposed to e.g. Mac OS which is application-centric).

I mean, sure, it is all windows, it does make sense, it just seems a bit odd. I cannot imagine an OS named "Ablakok" which is the Hungarian equivalent of "Windows". I do not think anyone would name any products as such. If your native language is not English, how does it look like in your language?

On the flip side, there are loads of names/trademarks which would sound very strange when you hear them for the first time when translated from non-English to English. Consider "Volkswagen" as "People's cart".

For example I have some sort of "anchoring" effect on some names such as Mac Pro, I still cannot accept it as a good name compared to the previous name: PowerMac. The older name is much more natural and better in my mind. Are you perhaps experiencing a similar effect with an the English trademark which has been a natural part of your vocabulary for a long time.

As for "Windows" in my native tongue, we have the same name for the digital rectangular representation on screen, so it would work. But then again, trademarks and marketing names are seldom localised.

> we have the same name for the digital rectangular representation on screen

We do use the same term as well, but it still seems odd as a name for an OS, at least to me, because it is so generic and uninteresting, but we are really in a heavily subjective territory here.

As for the rest, yeah, you may be right.

Well, it wasn't an OS from the beginning. It was a DOS application that provided ... windows. Someone just forgot to rename it to "Processes" or "Files".

Myself I found it amusing that servers had Windows (NT).

How do you feel about some of their more recent product names? Such as

Entra

Azure

Dynamics AX

365

… and don’t even get me started on the version names they give their OS products :D

> and don’t even get me started on the version names they give their OS products :D

Yeah, when I was growing up, Windows hit version 2000, but we've somehow regressed all the way back to 11. (The hilarity of Windows 11 being an actual regression, not only numerical, is unintentional.) Let's not forget the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Limited Numbered Signature Edition.

https://www.neowin.net/news/longest-product-name-ever-mwvuul...

I don’t feel much, honestly. Although “Office” was still one of the beautiful ones, but they decided to ditch it for 365?

I'm glad we've moved from Intel Core Duo 2. It's like BMW introducing "The BMW Engine", with its next generation engine!

I think you mean the Intel® Core™2 Duo.

It’s all binaries. Who cares about names?

Maybe when they introduce their version of Claude’s Computer Use [1] they’ll call it “Microsoft Windows Copilot”

Not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot, which is not to be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is not to be confused with Github Copilot…

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use

[2] https://copilot.microsoft.com

[3] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...

[4] https://github.com/features/copilot

Yea, I wrote about this Copilot confusion here: https://tongwing.woon.sg/blog/copilot-which-one/

A guess:

They want to piggybank on existing branch of X so a feature tangentially related with it gets called X or X_y. Then X or X/X_y gets canned and you don't know what's what.

What's wrong with the names? Personally, I love Microsoft 365. It just rolls off the tongue and is clearly more meaningful than a silly name like "Office." Who ever heard of an office? Why mess around with a single, familiar name when it can be long, ill-fitting, AND irrelevant all at once? I'm excited to try their next product Microsoft Copilot Professional 365 Enterprise For Workgroups (which I presume will be the name for notepad.exe in future releases).

I mean, some people say One Note is a silly name, but I like that you can look it up in the dictionary and it will tell you exactly what it is: Monotonous.

Personally I’m looking forward to the Xbox Series 365 One XS

I thought it would go

XboX (1)

XboX 360

XboX One

XboX Three Sixty

It all goes back to Microsoft not naming the 360 "Xbox 3" with some lame excuse for why it did so. Yes, everyone would have laughed, but no one would remember or care today that the "Xbox 5" isn't actually the fifth Xbox.

Makes sense, they didn't want to have the Xbox 2 going against Playstation 3. But in the long term, yeah. Would've been better if they just came out and said "we're in the same console generation as the Playstation 3 and skipped 2 to make that clear in the name."

Even 20 years ago, Microsoft knew they had problem with its naming and marketing[0], but I guess it didn't matter.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

> Is there an internal group who's sole job is to ensure names have conflicting meaning?

They must have been responsible for Skype / Skype for business, which must have been responsible for $1B of lost productivity all on its own. So many hours of “why can’t Larry join the conference call?” wasted in 15 minute increments.

Just like we'll love the Windows 11 taskbar.

Just like we'll love not being able to uninstall Copilot.

Just like we'll love being forced to create a Microsoft Account on install.

Things I've ran into on Windows 11. (Dont @ me that 'I don't have that problem', I do)

>The colors can conflict between dark mode and deafult OS to the point you cannot see text

>There are clickbait news stories that cannot be turned off

>Onedrive will fill up with data and bother you about being full

>For some reason, some programs will not display despite clicking on them. You must minimize the program infront of them

>There is no switch user button

>I was unable to figure out how to add a password to an account

>Ads are on by default

What I find amazing is that corporate professional computers have literal ads on them. I have a fortune 20 job and I have ads on my computer. These ads are for competitor products, for politics, and sports.

Anyway, LPT: For a personal OS, Fedora. Literally higher quality than Windows. Shockingly higher quality, I was a bit frustrated that I didn't know about fedora sooner. I don't consider Fedora 'Linux', because Linux has a bad reputation with things like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint that are 2+ years outdated out of the box. Fedora is different. I have a windows computer for legacy software like Adobe and CAD, but those are only used when doing work. Sometimes I have an old video game that needs windows.

For debloating Windows 10 - 11:

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools

Other than that, I do recommend Linux (mainstream ones are easy to install), for sure. I have been using it ever since I was 13 years old if not younger.

If you say it's solid, I'll buy it... but the first one is terrifying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even if Chris Titus is legit if his site gets owned so does anyone running this as Administrator in the way described.

> irm "hxxps://christitus[.]com/win" | iex

I only used the last one, that seemed to work.

I know you are trying to be helpful, but this is a bandaid at best.

I also wouldn't feel comfortable installing this on a computer that is security critical.

The other thing is that Windows is annoying. Where Fedora 'just works', Windows needs a third party debloater tool?

I'm certain its not going to fix all the items I listed as well..

I know it is a bandaid, I would obviously recommend Linux. It is for people who MUST use Windows.

I have the impression that the entire concept of "store" as seen in Windows is going downhill. No enterprise is able to use it, and that's the stronghold of Microsoft. Also generally less and less applications there, so giving up on this particular one is not even so surprising. After all you still have the "normal" Remote Desktop, and yes the 365 app which is the enterprisey one - expect it to grow all those missing limbs.

Rest in peace Store for Business. I really miss how easy it was to actually use and like as an Enterprise device manager. Then it was gone

I have used the Windows Store version of Remote Desktop since it landed. I really liked it. When the news broke a few weeks ago they were going to deprecate it in favor of Windows App (tried, didn't like), I decided I would create my own launcher since a large part of my job is automation with PowerShell. This won't be for everyone, but if you live in Windows and need to connect to remote servers and you like Windows Terminal and PowerShell, you may find this to your liking.

Code free to use. Pasted here: https://pastebin.com/EGArXbFi

I gave up with all modern Remote desktop and switched back to vnc and its been working flawlessly. I use tailscale to make the vnc ports accessible to my private network and I'm able to just connect via tightvnc. Remote desktop was only ever complicated because you had to open ports and make your machines accesible online, and with tailscale solving that whole mess for me its as simple as connect to this ip and its done. Thats all the paid options ever took care for you, the core functionality hasnt been changed in forever, unless i guess you care about extreme low latency which products like parsec offer.

Tailscale adds a lot of latency in my testing of Moonlight/Sunshine over it

I have recently switched to Rustdesk and it has worked quite well for my use case.

Why would you favor pushing pixels over pushing geometry?

One (admittedly obscure) reason is the way rdp handles smart cards. It cancels any locally connected devices and forwards the client's instead. Which is a problem if the whole point of the machine you're connecting to is that it has a USB token attached to it with your codesigning keys on it. That one took quite a lot of swearing to figure out :p

We now use this exact setup to get around that (tightvnc + tailscale)

Self-hosted VPNs cleanly solve the port access problem using free software. As a bonus, there's generally minimal added latency because it's just another encrypted direct TCP connection.

So which Remote Desktop are they talking about?

I use a "Remote Desktop" to connect to my headless windows box. It has even a Mac OS app.

Is that the remote desktop they're talking about? Or some other that I didn't know about.

I used the Remote Desktop app on macOS at work. It was replaced by the new Windows app.

I’ve been using it for a few months. First launch is jarring, as it’s a massive window instead of the tiny saved connection window I used to have. But after resizing the window and tweaking a couple things, it’s functionally the same now.

Though I’m not a heavy user these days. I have a VDI I connect to a few times per month, and the occasional Windows server.

> It was replaced by the new Windows app.

Replaced how? My app doesn't yell at me that it's shutting down (as opposed to skype).

Also the original article leads me to believe there are several applications called Remote Desktop and only one of them is shutting down. I'm hoping someone will tell me which is which and how I figure out which one I'm using.

I think there was a notification or some kind of banner on the app. I can’t remember exactly. Sadly I also don’t remember the circumstances of the migration… if I did it, or it happened for me.

It was my work laptop, which I only have so much control over, so I’m remain fairly detached from the administration for my own sanity.

That is quite a roundabout way to increase anydesk user count.

Rustdesk for the win!

In all fairness Remote Desktop wasn't all that great, but yeah, here comes another Windows 11-coded shenanigan that I'm sure we'll love.

I use Windows App at work and honestly it's really good, a lot of QoL features, specially if you have to manage a lot of machines.

So, is there any way to connect to these machines using Linux now?

Nice, no sooner then Linux forcing Remote Desktop on us to the exclusion of Network Transparency, Microsoft is obsoleting it.

So, will Linux follow Microsoft and move to something else ? That seems to be what the Linux Foundation is good for.

As I read from the article, Microsoft is basically retiring one of their three Windows clients. I don't see any implications for Linux in that.

Yeah, it's typical Microsoft brand confusion, though El Reg is certainly happy to use it for clickbait.

Don't feed the trolls

Wait, Linux what? Gotta link?

I think this about wayland vs X11, where the wayland protocol is local only and remote access generally involves sending pixels as opposed to draw commands around (which, unless you have a very good network connection, is usually the better option anyway, pretty much every time I tried to use X11 over the network it was unusably slow. Wayland also doesn't exclude being able to have remote windows as opposed to a whole remote desktop using pixel-slinging, but I don't know if any actual implementations support that).

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