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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.
It seems to me that Microsoft managers don't have a reasonable vision of the eventual results of their recent ideas for the future.
If Microsoft tries to charge a monthly fee for an operating system, eventually 1) Nations will all gather together and try to buy Windows from Microsoft. That would be cheaper than paying monthly. Or, 2) Nations will gather together and contribute to ReactOS, a free operating system that runs Windows programs.
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (August 4, 2015)
We no longer have a usable Windows operating system. We can't go to customers and tell them their computers are not secure from outside access.
Because of the Windows 10 spyware, customers have been delaying buying new equipment.
There's no way Microsoft will go into ordinary consumer. Instead Microsoft will go into enterprise consumer which is already happy paying sums of money into Microsoft since forever.
And the consumer version will have morr ads and data mining
It seems to me that Microsoft managers don't have a reasonable vision of the eventual results of their recent ideas for the future.
They aren't targeting corporate users they are targeting the mass market idiot consumer, because pioneering by the videogame industry through mmo's, and apple and other phone companies building walled garden appstores for their phones, and steam doing the same thing. They will get it all in the end because the average citizen is tech a illiterate moron.
Software companies can sit in their office and "release" the software via the net, and keep part of it on servers in their offices. Before high speed internet penetration was everywhere, the only way they could get paid was by shipping you the entire software physically or they wouldn't get paid.
The internet allows tech companies to force policies on ignorant consumers because the literate consumer base cannot hold them accountable. You'd need physical proximity to the business for your anger and discontent to effect company policy. The free market is dead and has long since been so, the internet removed any last bit of consumer power consumers had. Welcome to the silicon valley dictatorship driven by idiot half of the consumer buying public.
George carlin said it well about humanity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
For the first time ever, Microsoft employees will be forced to actually eat their own dogfood. They will realize finally that their software is completely unmanageable. They will revolt or quit in droves. It will be an unmitigated P.R. disaster. Hundreds of millions of people will give up on desktop computing altogether. Microsoft will single handedly kill their own golden goose and then flail about for someone to blame when the stock prices begin to plummet. Google will eat their lunch with cheap hybridized Android "desktop replacement" devices.
The post you are quoting is absolutely correct. and your post does not dispute it or detract from it.
I'm still using Office 2003. on Windows 7 SP1, and yes, the file format converters still work perfectly, both forward and backward. I don't NEED to upgrade, and I don't want to either. I hate everything about the ribbon interface, I use the ALT menus, and don't you dare try to tell me they have replicated the shortcuts because they fucking haven't! Try selecting some precise area of text with arrows and the shift key, then press "ALT - O and then O". Are you looking at the Font Dialog? No?! Exactly. Lies. (on their part!)
I will never update Windows again. Spyware and "telemetry" killed it for me. Windows user since 3.1
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
They aren't targeting corporate users they are targeting the mass market idiot consumer,
Unfortunately a lot of people will get roped in because idiots who aren't targeted for this will happily ride along.
I participate in a system that is intended to provide emergency communications via radio, with something that looks like email. I say "looks like" because it isn't, and doesn't obey many of the RFC for email. This system is based on ... Windows. It only runs on Windows 7 now because they haven't figured out how to break it like they broke it on Windows XP. Windows 10 is the preferred platform.
The people in charge of this platform are die-hard zealots for Windows, including every patch and update as soon as it comes out. If you mention that you have disabled Win 10 updates you will be set upon as if you are a bear raiding their honey hive. You will be branded as an outlaw who is setting them up for bots and attacks and personal assaults, even if you are a computer professional who knows how to defend a system against such things without needing Microsoft controlling your devices.
There are REPEATED stories of how Win 10 updates break this system for users, many of whom are providing the gateways between radio and the network. Some of them are unattended, distant sites that can become critical communications resources in a disaster or emergency, and yet it's ok if they crash and burn because Microsoft issued a patch that changes how the sound system works (just one example of failure).
Once Desktop As A Service becomes standard, these folks will leap upon it and cling to it like it's a liferaft and they're drowning rats. It won't matter if they've given complete control of their system on a large scale to a company that does not care if their updates break it, and break it in a way that it cannot recover without significant time and effort on the part of the users. ("Reinstall windows, then reinstall the software ..." is a common "fix". Or just "uninstall and then delete the root directory that contains the software, then reinstall from scratch" is the most common "fix". The fact that the software installs in the root directory of the boot disk isn't an issue for them ... the computer is theirs once you install their software. It has no other use. Oh, "install teamviewer and I'll remote in and fix it for you" is the standard op for minor fixes.)
There are some open-source helpers to this system. You can run a gateway on linux. There's not much to a gateway, after all. It's just a pipeline to the visual basic code now running in the AWS cloud. When you know that the INTERNET side of the "email" system was written entirely in VB you'll understand how Microsoft-locked it is.
They'll be right on board with DaaS. And anyone who wants to participate in that emergency services system will get dragged into the mud with them.
> Proof: How many (LINUX) man pages actually have examples
FTFY
--I'll back you up on that. But there are only so many resources out there that the average distro has to provide man-hours. They rely on end-users for bugreports, so maybe the best way to add an example to a manpage would be to submit a bugreport to upstream and let it trickle down. Any takers or better suggestions?
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
will see a significant increase in Linux, macOS and may actually BE the death of the desktop.
Ironic that the folks who helped bring the desktop to the masses would also be the ones to kill it off. :|
All in the name of greed.
There is exactly ZERO chance I will ever " rent " my operating system and cede what little control I have :|
left to someone like Microsoft. I keep my drawing tablet ( Wacom Studio Pro / Win10 ) offline because I
don't want it updating / breaking anything. Will be impossible to do with a Managed Desktop that is required
to check in on a monthly basis to see if you are still " allowed " to use your computer
Once implemented, I'm pretty sure we're seeing the final days of Microsoft. The smart ones will start selling
their stock off as soon as possible.
We no longer have a usable desktop operating system! ... Linux has VERY poor documentation. A friend of mine said this perhaps 20 years ago: "It's free but you will spend at least a week getting it to work." So, Linux is NOT free.
Linux mint's install is pretty painless. My mom uses it all the time. It's not hard. I have it installed as well. If AOL was still around they could send out DVDs. Of course DVDs aren't as common these days, but usb sticks are not hard either.
About the only way to make it easier is to have Walmart sell install media for the cost of the media. The problem is Walmart doesn't want to sell something that people might have problems with. It isn't worth their risk.
Fundamentally the thing that stalls Linux as much as anything is the fact that there is no large organization handling tech support, because that costs money. The only solution I see to this would be for the government to pay to support the most common versions because it is in the public interest. Republicans would go ape shit over the idea, but you want widespread adoption of linux, well, someone needs to do the tech support and hand holding till it reaches critical mass, and that costs money.
There is a long tail of specialty distributions that hardly anyone uses, and then there are four or five options that people use. Here they are with a rough popularity score:
91 Ubuntu
18 Debian 18
6 Red Hat 6 (higher if CentOs is included)
7 Mint
3 Suse
1 Manjaro
You see the top four is what almost everyone uses.
Most of the others are based on one of these anyway, so if you learn about Debian-like Linux systems, you just 80 different distros. Plus they are all Linux, of course. Often I don't know or care which distro I'm using at the moment. A paper towel is a paper towel is a paper towel, regardless of brand. In many ways, Linux is Linux, regardless of distro.
You've spent perhaps 20 years learning Windows, then re-learning it differently every three years when Microsoft redoes it. If you learn Linux in a week, that's about a thousand times faster than you learned Windows.
For the first few years I used Linux, I frequently referenced a Unix book from the early 1980s. Everything in the book still worked the same 20 years later. I have scripts my mom wrote 30 years ago which still run fine on my Linux machine today. No need to forget what you knew and learn completely different every few years like you do with Windows.
There will be lawsuits by the hundreds, if not thousands, when your "managed desktop" causes downtime in excess of the EULA, or if, in your case, an emergency cannot be managed properly because the damned computer went down for an update, and one or more people die as a result.
I imagine emergency services will be told to buy redundant systems so that computer "A" can update while computer "B" maintains services - or something along those lines.
If Microsoft want control of your desktop, they can damn well pay for the consequences.
I will run Win 7 as a guest under Debian until the heat death of the universe. If I'm ever required to run software that will only run under Windows Managed Desktop, it too will run in a VM. I'm learning a lot about iptables these days.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Not even slightly, no. ChromeOS is a locked down operating system that's essentially gratis, not an externally managed operating system that you rent.
And while ChromeOS is locked down, it's possible to unlock for free in an approved, universal, supported way with some minor inconveniences. Additionally, Crostini promises to open it further even without switching the operating system into an unlocked mode, allowing arbitrary applications to run in a sandboxed environment.
So ChromeOS costs nothing, and is becoming more and more open. Windows costs money, is in the process of being locked down, and this article suggests it'll become more and more closed, and more and more expensive.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This is a problem for people who learned to copy-paste from StackOverflow instead of learning to read documentation.
True, but - a lot of "modern" solutions are basically built to work like that. I'm doing some hobby stuff in a Javascript framework right now (not my choice, the only tool available for this job) and doing copy-paste is literally the only way to get things working because there are so many virtually identical ways to get to the same goal and none of them are explained anywhere or make an intuitive sense that the fastest and only reliable way to get it working is to go through teh stackoverflow solutions until you find the one that works for your particular combination of patchwork bullshit.
Entire generations of coders grow up being copy-paste people not because they are lazy, but because their ecosystem supports this as the most viable way.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The mass market no longer buy PCs. They are content consumers they buy Apple and Android. They use smart TVs, smart phones, smart tablets because they are dumb and just want their computer to do simple things for them. The power PC user will absolutely tell M$ to go fuck itself, what is that Hitler one, on yeah with a pineapple pointy end first.
So M$ is basically driving down a one way street with a brick wall at the end and accelerating. They watched their mobile phone crap die because people hated what they were doing and thumb in bum, mind in neutral, they just keep going straight down that path. They simply can not be told and are not listening to what a pack of cunts they truly are.
So now the shift will occur, obviously Android is killing it on content consumption devices and Apple is doing is doing better in spite of themselves with selling you privacy, rather than selling your privacy. SteamOS (steam was kind of dopey no distributing FOSS on steam to promote steamOS) and Linux winning everywhere except the desktop. Playstation of course well they're a bit slow and are sort of going nowhere.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The problems you are listing are Windows problems and not Linux problems. It's like you are complaining that your Ford parts don't fit on your new GM.
The MS Office argument is B/S. Very few need MS Office because very few need Macros but keep telling yourself that.
Printer/Scanner/fax is faster on Linux than Mac or Windows but I guess it's what you buy or how long you keep your stuff. I have a scanner that is 20 years old and still works on Linux but there is no support on Windows.
What I see is people making choices and then complaining why their choices suck but don't want to even try a different solution. Windows sucks because of the items you listed. On Mac, Linux *BSD's or even Windows you don't have these issues if you choose OSS. It's the decisions you make. 30 years I've had no issues running business and personal stuff without being dependent on MS or Apple.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...