If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
Obviously these are going to be used for corporate or organizational settings, as it what was then with the so-called Network Computer thin clients which Oracle tried promoting but flopped.
I wonder why they failed previously 🤔🤔
I don’t know Oracle’s product but the company I work for has had a ton of people working on VDI for like 15 years now. It’s a solved problem. The only real annoying part was that it required pretty solid bandwidth and people would try using it on shitty Internet and then expect us to fix it. I’m kind of surprised it took this long for a consumer version to get off the ground. I would never use it because it sounds like a privacy nightmare but most people don’t think about that shit.
Laughs in Debian
The Live USB disk laughing maniacally at the PC
Asus and Dell announce their own Mac Minis but this time with blackjack and hookers.
“not power themselfs” ?
Microsoft will determine when the PC needs to be booted up as per your employer’s demands 😆
It’s a really stupid way to describe thin clients, anyway. Assuming that’s what this is. I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.
I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.
I know bandwidth isn’t latency but for a thin client having a rock solid network connection to the virtual desktop server is pretty important for the user interface. I’m guessing pushing video and animations can require pretty high data rates, too.
That’s crazy
Our best hope is that companies outside the US stop buying Microsoft. People will need to produce computers for them. Then we in the US can import them and run Linux.
‘Someone, do something about our problem so we can take advantage of it’
Fuck this is exhausting
What do you expect us to do? I don’t buy anti-consumer products as much as possible and I advise everyone I know to do the same. I explain why things are bad, but most people don’t care enough to listen. On top of that, these companies collude so that all the options end up being anti-consumer bullshit and you’re stuck trying to find the least bad one.
I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?
I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!
“Some adult needs to come fix my problems for me” seems to be super common these days. It’s partly why the US is in the state it’s in, but certainly not limited to the US.
Its a reality. Why does apple use usb c now? Because someone else got tired of their shit.
Do you say similar about all the corporations and governments who have relied on the US for decades? Hmmm?
Yes. Yes we do. But please fix you god damned country
Yep, spoken like a true American.
corporations
I suppose you mean tech? Many parts of the world offer value for money products. Had it not been the US in anything any corporation needs, someone else will step up.
Besides which most corporations rely on China more than the US now.
governments
Another thing shared and cooperation offered.
Fix your problems instead of expecting others to step in.
It’s like a Chromebook, but for Windows. Only it doesn’t run Windows. Please buy our garbage.
I’m so sick of Microsoft I actually installed Fedora KDE Plasma.
Genuinely, it’s nicer than windows lol
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying, but overall it works really well, has more features and looks slick.
Ain’t ever going back.
Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)
I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.
I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying
I was on windows since 3.1, dual booted various distros of Linux the past 15 years, and removed windows from my computers over a year ago.
I would have to crawl forums to find fixes for stupid shit in windows once in awhile, less than Linux 15 years ago, but more than Linux in the lead up to getting rid of it. The thing that really pissed me off was the most egregious issues with win10/11 that id be looking for solutions to would always be changed back on the next update.That’s not the worse. The worse is when every goddamn awful thing in your paid-for OS is to be solvable with a time consuming sfc /scannow and another command which always take lots of tine.
I almost considee those [non-working but always peddled first] worse than a greybeard telling you can solve your [Linux] problem fetching the source of 10 packages from git and compiling manually.
Even Steam works perfectly fine.
The only games I can’t play are games that install rootkits that I don’t want anyway. Now I don’t have to explain to people that I don’t want malware on my PC and can just say “Ah, shucks, can’t play, Linux” 10/10 recommend.
Plasma is great, I’m loving Kubuntu.
Going back to the dumb terminal days of the 60s & 70s
Now with added surveillance and advertising!
If the pc has specs to run something from the cloud it has specs to run a local os.
Depends on what you do and depends on how it’s set up.
At a previous job we had thin clients set up to connect to some remote desktops, and indeed they were running an OS locally, but had barely enough resources to run the OS and the client app.
Maybe uould find a version of linux that would run on them. I’m not a linux aficionado but I’ve found cut-down flavours useful in the past when I’ve needed something that could run on a crippled potato.
Again, depends on what your use case is. Even if you find a stripped down OS that’s less resource heavy, you’ll probably still be using the same other software (i.e. same browser on the same modern web, and you’ll be out of RAM once you open 10-20 tabs). If a manufacturer has meant this as base specs for a thin client, you’re not tricking anyone (but yourself) by trying to use it as a full featured computer, and you’re still driving sales (at least on the hardware part) on a deliberately crippled product.
If you want to vote with your wallet (as IMO everyone should), you don’t buy this and repurpose it; you simply don’t buy it.
If you can run it on a pi, you can run it on these
Yep, just looking at it screams thin client. This will have just enough for networking (wifi/bluetooth), running three monitors (no gaming), some 3.5mm audio, and usb 2.0. If it’s business focues, probably some remote mgmt stuff, and maybe a default VPN client.
At least Linux runs well on old hardware (and still supports)
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
Apparently my job will be getting rid of our personal local network drives (we each have our own only we can connect to) and moving that to Microsoft one drive. Our IT guy hates the new changes, but the orders come from way above. Not sure how well it will work…
We use onedrive at work… everything goes onto onedrive, and then daily we have people bitching that onedrive has deleted their files.
Yup. You’ll have to babysit Onedrive UI client like a toddler. I use rclone when I need guarantees the files were indeed uploaded.
Don’t worry, to make it work,he’ll only need to open the firewall to the Internet for dozens of MS subdomains and thousands of IP’s in ranges that can randomly change from day to day. Totally more an issue for systems which might have been segregated from the Internet before!
/s
