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With DaaS Windows Coming, Say Goodbye To Your PC As You Know It (computerworld.com)
Ostracus shares a report from Computerworld, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Microsoft is getting ready to replace Windows 10 with the Microsoft Managed Desktop. This will be a "desktop-as-a-service" (DaaS) offering. Instead of owning Windows, you'll "rent" it by the month. Microsoft Managed Desktop is a new take. It avoids the latency problem of the older Windows DaaS offerings by keeping the bulk of the operating system on your PC. But you'll no longer be in charge of your Windows PC. Instead, it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft. Maybe you'll be OK with that.
Microsoft has been getting away from the old-style desktop model for years now. Just look at Office. Microsoft would much rather have you rent Office via Office 365 than buy Microsoft Office and use it for years. Microsoft Managed Desktop is the first move to replacing "your" desktop with a rented desktop. By 2021, I expect the Managed Desktop to be to traditional Windows what Office 365 is to Office today: the wave of the future. Or maybe tsunami, depending on your perspective. I'm not happy with this development. I'm old enough to remember the PC revolution. We went from depending on mainframes and Unix boxes for computing power to having the real power on our desktops. It was liberating. Now Microsoft, which helped lead that revolution, is trying to return us to that old, centralized control model.
Microsoft has been getting away from the old-style desktop model for years now. Just look at Office. Microsoft would much rather have you rent Office via Office 365 than buy Microsoft Office and use it for years. Microsoft Managed Desktop is the first move to replacing "your" desktop with a rented desktop. By 2021, I expect the Managed Desktop to be to traditional Windows what Office 365 is to Office today: the wave of the future. Or maybe tsunami, depending on your perspective. I'm not happy with this development. I'm old enough to remember the PC revolution. We went from depending on mainframes and Unix boxes for computing power to having the real power on our desktops. It was liberating. Now Microsoft, which helped lead that revolution, is trying to return us to that old, centralized control model.
> Linux has VERY poor documentation
Not just Linux but a lot of GPL software does as well in my experience. :-(((
Proof: How many man pages actually have examples.
This is one area the *BSDs do better. (Security too, but that's a separate discussion.)
ReactOS will never be a viable Windows substitute. Ever. A HUGE advantage Windows has over even Linux is its platforms. MFC and ATL, Terminal Services, Internet Explorer/Shdocvw.dll, VB6 runtime, etc will just never be implemented. While it may be binary compatible, the software backend just doesn't exist. And if you are ok with Windows sans everything that makes Windows Windows, then you can just move to Linux or something else just the same.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
What everyone here seems to fail, and it is tagged as such right at the very top of the article, is that this isn't journalism. This article is one person's opinion piece. That is it.
This entire thing, this article, something that has gone fucking viral all day in every goddamn tech site that I visit, is nothing more than an oversensationalistic bullshit opinion piece.
It is a click-bait viral article to drum up views to get advertising dollars, and all you fell for it.
The title of this article and the ComputerWorld article are misleading. If you read the original ZDNet article that is being linked to, you will find that this is just Microsoft trying to take a piece of the DaaS market. This will be offered as an additional service, primarily intended for enterprise users. Not your desktop at home.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-got-a-new-plan-for-managing-windows-10-devices-for-a-monthly-fee/
That would be ChromeOS, which already has window dragging support coyly tucked away in developer options. Also now runs Android apps and full Linux distros (in a vm in a container, how's that for paranoia).
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Twenty years for me. Linux was crude back then, but never as bad as early versions of Windows, not even close. And never locked up or needed reboot, just like now. And relatively easy to update, remember the rpmfind days? (Still exists actually.) Star Office was the office suite and Navigator was the browser. For many people, the mailer too. KDE was largely unknown and the Gnome guys were just getting started on their successful jihad to force KDE into full GPL and their less successful struggle to build a usable desktop after that. Even then, you could get by with Linux instead of Windows. I did. Sometimes there would be difficulties, PDF had not yet displaced .doc for business communication so that sometimes caused issues. But nothing remotely close to the major issue of having to put up with Microsoft and its insecure, unstable excuse for an operating system.
Twenty years later, here we are. Two decades of being able to escape any time they want, and we see with something between horror and amusement, all those Microsoft victims still huddling in squalor in the Windows dungeon. Stockholm syndrome or what?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
> you must have a pretty awesome mom if she wrote linux shell scripts...
She is awesome, thanks. She wrote them for Unix, all the same utilities and most of the same conventions are on Linux.
> I wish there were some stuff to make the transition from Windows hell to Linux easier
Are you the type who enjoys fiddling with the registry? For most people, the switch is transparent. Chrome and Firefox still look and work exactly the same. Facebook is no different, Google Docs is exactly the same.
If you enjoy fiddling with the OS itself, Linux is very different and much easier. It's all about combining simple parts that are reused all over the place. One such simple thing is "everything is a file". Reading or searching your hard drive sectors works exactly the same as reading and searching a text file, because the bare drive is a file. Each partition is a file. A network connection is a file, an email is a file, even your keyboard is a file, which can be read like any other file (though slowly, unless you're a very fast typist). To search ANYTHING you can use the "grep" command. That'll search your drive sectors, it'll search your email, it'll search whatever because grep searches files, and everything is a file. That makes it much easier to learn because for example there is one tool that searches everything. There is another tool called "sort", which sorts - anything. You don't have to learn how to sort different kinds of things with different programs.
That's why the uproar about systemd - it's not a simple, small tool that can be used with other simple, small tools to build whatever you want, to whatever level of complexity you want. Like Microsoft Office, systemd is a big, complex thing with a lot to learn about it. Very not *nix style.
I have two current consoles and I pay no monthly fee...
I also don't even look at a game if there is a monthly fee associated with it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.