The End of the Desktop? (computerworld.com)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld : Of course, at one time, to get any work done with a computer, you first had to learn a lot, about computers, operating systems, commands and more. Eventually, "friendly" became the most important adverb in computing circles, and we've reached the point in user-friendliness that people don't even talk about it anymore. Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser. But Google's path is not Microsoft's path. Instead, it's moving us first to Windows as desktop as a service (DaaS) via Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD). This bundles Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security and cloud-based system management into Microsoft 365 Enterprise.

The next step, Windows Virtual Desktop, enables companies to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications on Azure-based virtual machines. If all goes well, you'll be able to subscribe to Windows Virtual Desktop this fall. Of course, Virtual Desktop is a play for business users -- for now. I expect Virtual Desktop to be offered to consumers in 2020. By 2025, Windows as an actual desktop operating system will be a niche product. Sound crazy? Uh, you do know that Microsoft already really, really wants you to "rent" Office 365 rather than buy Office 2019, don't you?

But what about games, you say? We'll always have Windows for games! Will we? Google, with its Google Stadia gaming cloud service, is betting we're ready to move our games to the cloud as well. It's no pipe dream. Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. So where is all this taking us? I see a world where the PC desktop disappears for all but a few. Most of us will be writing our documents, filling out our spreadsheets and doing whatever else we now do on our PCs via cloud-based applications on smart terminals running Chrome OS or Windows Lite. If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS.

Comments

Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also the year of the Linux desktop!

Re:Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a Linux desktop for two decades now.

Re:Soon

[DarkRookie2]

It still can't play all that many games.
M$ should open source DX11

Re:Soon

[omnichad]

It might be time to upgrade.

Re:Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure - I do that every week. And unlike some other OS, my upgrades don't suddenly change the look of everything. And they happen when I say so, not when some business says so.

Re:Soon

[locater16]

Both the virtual desktop and the linux desktop have been predicted for over 20 years now. Obviously it's been long enough that it'll just happen, the year of the virtual linux desktop has arrived right along side the year of the PS3, the end of closed source software, and the year Cryptocurrency has replaced government controlled money! Praise be lord Stallman, blessed be his name!

Re:Soon

[arglebargle_xiv]

I've had a Linux desktop for two decades now.

So have I. There's a Linux box on my desktop that I SSH into.

Re:Soon

[zifn4b]

It is also the year of the Linux desktop!

I used to work with a guy in 1998 that had been in IT since the 80's and he always said at the beginning of every year since he got in the industry, techie magazines would print with headlines like "This will be the year of Linux!" and at the end of the year like clockwork they would say "What happened to Linux?". "This year will be the end of the desktop" is basically the same thing. I'm pretty sure I've seen this on Slashdot periodically for at least 10 years when laptops started getting significantly better. There will always be highly resource intense applications like gaming, multimedia, software development, CAD, etc. that will require significantly more powerful machines than what a laptop can offer. The goal post always gets constantly moved too. I wonder if the next article will be: "This is the year everything moves to the cloud!" so we can milk everybody with subscription fees like we've never heard that one before.

259 million PCs sold last year

[JoeyRox]

Granted sales have been declining steadily but we're about as close to the end of the desktop as we are to End times.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Christ on a crutch. You might as well ask how many oranges were sold to eskimos living in the Sahara.

No, not every ass-hat is buying a new PC. The speed/power curve on those devices flattened out so there isn't much need. On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer. They buy a tablet because, gee whiz, it's cheaper (because the damned things are toasters).

Yes, PC sales are not as strong as the once were and tablet sales are increasing, but there is overlap between the two groups of users, and where a tablet does replace a PC or a laptop, its just until that person runs into a situation where they need to use a real application and not Twitter to the their friends or play stupid games.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[JoeyRox]

Ok, now how many tablets and smartphones were sold last year and to whom? The number of PCs sold by itself doesn't mean anything. Those could mostly be business computers, not personal computers, which is where the numbers are.

259 million PCs sold doesn't mean anything? Why is that? And how is the mix between business and personal use material? This article talks about the desktop losing to alternatives such as Windows Virtual Desktop, a product targeted to business users.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[MightyMartian]

Like it or not, the PC is fading. Yes, there's always going to be use-case scenarios, but a helluva lot of consumer computing these days is happening on portable devices and consoles. The shift is pretty profound, and as those devices become more powerful, I can see a general shift away from PCs in the consumer world.

Heck, in my business, half my emails are composed on my phone. It's the way the world is shifting. I wouldn't want to do any spreadsheet work or composition on a phone, but how many people are doing that?

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[JMJimmy]

I for one am looking to return to desktop computing. I am sick of trying to wrangle all my devices and info and having to wait on slow as sin mobile.

I want a single powerful/fast desktop that can handle the workload for my household, sit off in a corner out of sight, and everything else to be a screen for it to be delivered to. No one wants to deliver this to the end user though because it means they're only buying 1 expensive system instead of multiple. I for one can't afford the latter option and don't want the headaches that come with it.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Etcetera]

The main problem however stands: People are more willing to pay a one time fee to own something than to add another line to a bill. This is simply a sociological and psychological phenomena, more so when Cloud Service adds ISP shenanigans into the mix which everyone is already pissed enough about because that adds another variable to a monthly bill which is also an unstable variable that the user has no control over.

This is all well and good for our generation, but in case you haven't noticed, later-day Millennials and most of Gen-Z are growing up without an ownership mindset. However much this is due to economics and however much is a self-fulfilling prophecy for making the best of a bad economy is debatable, but the fact remains that the trend is *away* from ownership and *toward* services and this will continue until interrupted (no pun intended).

Urban millennials are convincing themselves that Ubering around is better than owning a car, that subscription music services are better than buying purchase rights (let alone buying a CD), Blu-ray collections are composed of only the best-of-the-absolutely-best favorites, and "experiences" like avocado toast flights are still being pushed intra-generationally above things like investing and home ownership.

This is a not a culture that sees any need for a desktop. For most, there's no need for anything more than a Chromebook, and for a great many their needs can be met by a tablet or reliable phablet/smartphone.

Programmers and hackers in the traditional sense are a rounding error (and frankly, many young programmers today have a cloud-only mindset too). Creatives might need processing power, but they really don't... they just need good bandwidth to where the processing power is.

What killed the desktop form factor? Wi-Fi.
What killed desktop *operating systems*? 4G.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Kjella]

I must admit that "convergence" devices has gained a whole lot less steam than I thought. Though I think a lot of these hurdles aren't really inherent but coming from different hardware (ARM vs x86), different operating systems (Android vs Windows), different control paradigms (touch vs keyboard/mouse), different degree of openness (store vs user installed) and the deals on offer have been severely compromised on their non-native side. Besides smartphones have been a tsunami that put 95% focus on catching that wave and 5% on the rest. Now though that the market has stabilized at 1.5 billion units and maybe even will go into a decline as people find their phones are already working pretty good, I expect the focus will come back to the desktop. At least the casual, non-enterprise non-gaming use of desktops.

I mean a modern smartphone has enough oomph to run a basic desktop, like you know the office computers with 1 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM from long ago. It just have to be able to do it without some crazy emulation/special solution. It should be that you plug your phone into a dock and you have a real working mini-computer that doesn't behave differently from a weak NUC. It should be able to handle a USB-C hub with your keyboard, mouse, screen, headset, printer etc. like it's an actual desktop computer. Microsoft went there but flunked out of the mobile market. Google has never really wanted to properly merge Android and Chromebooks. But I think Apple might be on the way to merge it into one OS with different peripherals.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[tlhIngan]

I want a single powerful/fast desktop that can handle the workload for my household, sit off in a corner out of sight, and everything else to be a screen for it to be delivered to. No one wants to deliver this to the end user though because it means they're only buying 1 expensive system instead of multiple. I for one can't afford the latter option and don't want the headaches that come with it.

Problem is single point of failure. Let's say they make the uber machine and people buy it (which they probably won't, given its cost).

People use it for TV, phone and web browsing. Now a hardware fault comes in and breaks the TV functionality (and by "TV", I mean general passive entertainment, so OTA, cable, Netflix, what have you) - perhaps a hard drive dies or something. In a lot of households, this would be a disaster. Even more so if it also takes out interactive entertainment as well.

Perhaps you'd like to Google for a solution? But you can't, because the machine was handling the internet and because it's broken, so is your ability to Google stuff!

You'll find these days, single point of failures are mildly annoying at best, disastrous at worse. Plenty of people have tried doing this - they've got complex HTPC contraptions to power the TV, only to have Windows update or some other thing to take it down and having to bear with an angry wife not able to watch their soaps. Enough that often a simple backup of a TiVo or other appliance increases WAF.

And nevermind the incredible utility of being able to Google for problems or test things on multiple platforms. If the PC breaks, you can use your phone or tablet and Google for a solution.

Single point of failure devices have to be extremely reliable, which also makes them extremely expensive (mainframe computers cost HOW MUCH again?). These days, instead of trying to do that, we add redundancy, which lets us use multiple cheaper computers or tablets or phones to accomplish the task, and if one fails, it's not such a big deal. It turns out the solution costs a lot less money as well, because it turns out reliability has a significant cost, both in terms of hardware and software.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[jbengt]

No, TFA is not about sales of computers.
It is about sales of the desktop operating system, which, according to TFA, is being pushed to the cloud by MS, so it will no longer be a stand-alone thing.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[BringsApples]

If Microsoft wants to stop selling operating systems, and stop updating operating systems, but you've built your whole company's business model around using MS products, what will you do?

And don't forget to consider the fact that once MS no longer cares about the desktop, and they're no longer selling any, then it can begin finger-pointing along the lines of:
"All hacking today is done on locally used platforms, not our Azure services - we can prove it." ...and laws begin to form around the same concept.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[BeNude]

Once our computing is moved to the cloud, any semblance of privacy you had will be gone because cloud providers have EULA's to hide behind when your privacy and or data security is compromised.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Sir_Eptishous]

As the AC has pointed out, the reality is that many people aren't going to be able to afford the subscription based model we are moving into.

People already are having a hard enough time paying their cell bill.

The subscription model is doable for those of us who can afford it, but even then it is a suckers game, having to pay all these monthly costs for various services, content, etc; The American public is getting milked dry.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Etcetera]

As the AC has pointed out, the reality is that many people aren't going to be able to afford the subscription based model we are moving into.

People already are having a hard enough time paying their cell bill.

The subscription model is doable for those of us who can afford it, but even then it is a suckers game, having to pay all these monthly costs for various services, content, etc; The American public is getting milked dry.

I don't disagree, but the younger generation right now is taking longer than expected to realize that.

And it's not just consumers. When you have to tell an IT person that TCO for actually having server hardware you run is less than renting container time from AWS, you're pushing them the same way.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Ol Olsoc]

Like it or not, the PC is fading. Yes, there's always going to be use-case scenarios, but a helluva lot of consumer computing these days is happening on portable devices and consoles.

Sure. The regular folks are on tablets and smartphones. They only consume, and don't produce anything but Facebook posts.

But the "end". Not hardly. Just user shift. The regular folks don't need what a Desktop can do. The professional user can hardly work without one. I use 27 inch screens at a minimum, and my latest worker computer is a 27 inch plus a 42 inch screen. Now my iPhone has iMovie on it, but I'm in no hurry to use it. Muh fingers are too big.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Ol Olsoc]

If Microsoft wants to stop selling operating systems, and stop updating operating systems, but you've built your whole company's business model around using MS products, what will you do?.

The faithful will do as Microsoft directs. It's the BOHICA principle.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anne Thwacks]

On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer.

Cos he's got two already!

Its not like the new ones are better. Maybe new servers are better than old ones, but now home PCs are mostly crap. A quick trip to PC Wold revealed that most of their offerings are actually worse than my seven year old laptop in every respect. They don't even have DVD drives. No wonder they are not selling them.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anne Thwacks]

Windows Virtual Desktop, a product targeted to Mr Nice-but-stupid.

FTFY

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anne Thwacks]

whose only difference from phones and laptops is the presence of a PSU which grants better power control and an absence of batteries,

You are forgetting the LTO tape drive. (Or maybe you prefer to have Google minding your data for you?)

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[MightyMartian]

My smartphone has been my salvation on more than one occasion when routers or servers have gone down. It's damned useful to have an independent device I can go on the Internet and find solutions. Yes, I could do the same with a laptop, but then I'd still have to tether to my phone, so it's a helluva lot simpler just to bring up the browser on my phone.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[MightyMartian]

I think that's pretty much my point. There will always be scenarios where a PC will be necessary, but that's only for a fairly small subset of users. In the business environment they will persist the longest, but even there portable smart devices have made major inroads. Even corporate environments see a lot of computing done on phones and tablets.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anne Thwacks]

you've built your whole company's business model around using MS products, what will you do?

I believe the most popular answer here is: go in a corner and hide but "jump of the top of a tower block" is probably a close second.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[thereddaikon]

The PC isn't fading. Its MATURE. The tech sector has never dealt with product maturity well. I think its because the silicon valley mindset pushes the notion of constant improvements. Until recently PC's have seen year over year obvious feature and performance improvements. Back in the 90's it was common to say your computer was obsolete before you got it out of the box and that was certainly true. But today you can do just fine on a computer over 5 years old depending on your workload. My primary personal laptop is a ThinkPad x230. My work laptop is a new T480 and honestly the T480 isn't all that better.Standard office work, media consumption and casual gaming can all be done on systems that a decade ago would have been tossed in the trash. The overall PC market is shrinking some, coming off of the 30 odd year growth high its had but the niches where there is never enough performance continue to see growth. Gaming PC's, media content creation, programming, scientific uses etc are all doing fine and very profitable. It just so happens to be that 90% of PC users dont fall into those categories. They check their email, watch Netflix and use Turbotax once a year. You can do that on a mid range i5 several generations old no problem.

PC's have also been pushed out of some markets where there is better suited form factors. Smartphone, tablets, chromebooks etc are common but the analysts said all of those would dethrone the PC. None of them have, tablets have actually started to take a downturn as smartphones have morphed to fill both roles. And even the phones have just about reached maturity. They definitely have reached saturation.

This is the natural evolution of markets. Eventually you get to a point where major product improvements become less common and you simply have refinement. It happened to cars, at some point in the 80's or 90's normal cars got about as good as they are today in terms of safety, reliability and performance. They didn't stop improving but a mid 90's Camry is still perfectly fine. It's reliable, its safe and it gets decent economy. A 2019 Camry is better still, but not so much that I would just toss the older one if it was still in good working order. The same couldn't be said comparing a 70's sedan to a 90's one though. Its unlikely a 70's car would have even made it into the 90's unless an unreasonable amount of money had been spent on it or if it had some collector value that makes it worthwhile.

One thing that has changed is that as technology improves it seems that it takes less and less time for a product to move from its growth stage to maturity. Cars took the better part of a century to get there. The personal computer took about 30 years. Smartphones have done it in a decade. The next cool consumer product will probably go from hot new thing to perfected in around 5 years. Again, maturity doesn't mean people stop buying it or that it doesn't get better. What it does mean is that for most consumers its "good enough". Aside from niche use cases year over year improvements become minor and the majority of sales are based on replacing attrition due to damage, failure, loss or theft. Niche an high end subsets like luxury cars, gaming PC's and $1k smartphones are broadly immune to this. But the demographics who buy into them are either dedicated enough or rich enough to be able to commit to replacing their hardware often.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[drinkypoo]

It's going to bottleneck and one person will easily be able to choke everyone else no matter how much you spend on it, but you can certainly multiseat out Linux to multiple displays, if that's what you're into. You can get a liquid cooling system and locate the radiators in a plenum to make the whole thing very quiet, but it won't change the fact that multiple PCs deliver a better experience, which is why we got where we are today with multiple PCs.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[BringsApples]

Please don't jump. I'll meet you in the South-East corner. We can hang out. I'll show you how to use Linux.

Re: 259 million PCs sold last year

[illiac_1962]

Yeah. Try to through junior a tablet and see what happens. "Thanks. Now what about my computer, it sucks. Overwatch is so laggy and I have the settings at medium."

Re: 259 million PCs sold last year

[illiac_1962]

...but it feels soooo good.

Re: 259 million PCs sold last year

[illiac_1962]

A printer? For???

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[liquid_schwartz]

This is all well and good for our generation, but in case you haven't noticed, later-day Millennials and most of Gen-Z are growing up without an ownership mindset. However much this is due to economics and however much is a self-fulfilling prophecy for making the best of a bad economy is debatable, but the fact remains that the trend is *away* from ownership and *toward* services and this will continue until interrupted (no pun intended).

Urban millennials are convincing themselves that Ubering around is better than owning a car, that subscription music services are better than buying purchase rights (let alone buying a CD), Blu-ray collections are composed of only the best-of-the-absolutely-best favorites, and "experiences" like avocado toast flights are still being pushed intra-generationally above things like investing and home ownership.

The perfect serfs, they can't even conceive of ever owning anything. Just work and rent. The 1% really outdid themselves on this generation. Gen Z is even better, they can't even bear to hear alternative viewpoints, they just go with what they're told. The future is looking grim indeed.

Re: 259 million PCs sold last year

[Etcetera]

Now a good but tiny and cheap MSP might be able to skate the edge where reselling AWS is more profitable than reselling inhouse gear, but a good MSP doesn't stay tiny, isnt cheap and a big one doesn't stay good.

That's basically exactly my point. Every broke, 18 year old HS grad or college student starts out renting. You should be, in life, trying to grow to a point where you can take advantage of not-renting.

This is the MSP equivalent of giving up capital investment in exchange for op-ex avocado experiences.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Zaelath]

The PC isn't fading. Its MATURE. The tech sector has never dealt with product maturity well.

I think you'll find that's MBAs and other acolytes of Keynes, regardless of the sector.

How can you possibly expect shareholders to be happy if you only made the same $30 billion in Q4 that you made in Q3? Madness!

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[postbigbang]

There's another point, unmentioned, but related. Where do you compute, and can you trust the cloud, philosophically?

Microcomputing became popular in the late 1970s and early 80s because time-share systems and mini/mainframes were centrist in philosophy. Distributed thinking, even autonomous thinking spawned great software, and let to lots of hardware development, not to mention industrial computing.

You can't do this if you're totally in the cloud. Edge devices start to deteriorate from entropy-- the same old stuff, just vaguely prettier screens. You can't plug in USB to many clouds, and if you can, the ability for diverse devices (drivers, configurations, etc) simply are not available. Everyone gets the same cloud with different lipstick.

I don't want 100% of my stuff in Microsoft's cloud, where it'll spill-out, get deleted, become unavailable, get fed through someone's AI analyzer for fun and profit, etc. I don't trust Microsoft any farther than I can throw them-- their financial interests are to their shareholders, not me-- just like the social media tyrants and the surveillance governments. Paranoid? Maybe, but look at how staggering the leaks are, then think again.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[epine]

The most important idea in undergraduate economics is to think things through on the margin. They pound away at this for years, and some of the students manage to get there.

The paradox is that we're already really good at thinking on the margin, in specific instances.

For example, the French call orgasm la petite mort because as soon as your dick isn't hard any more—for all intents and purposes—it's just an irritating tube of flesh you piss through (in America, la petite mort is primarily a newlywed phenomena, wherein the fresh bride croons to the fresh groom , "hey, there, Happy Feet, you need to piss sitting down", and thus it is decreed that the man shall equate marriage to the hairy promontory of his angular kneecaps).

This isn't precisely marginal thinking as economics would have it, but apparently it's the best we can muster with what comes natural to our native cognitive toolbox.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[couchslug]

What's to look for? This is Slashdot. Build what you want or buy it.

Run a single terminal server and you get your wish. Central storage, easy backup, and if a client dies it's easy to replace.

https://www.edubuntu.org/docum...

You can boot your clients from USB flash drives without touching your existing OS while you're learning how to get your system as you prefer it.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[serviscope_minor]

How hard is it to tether to your phone??

For more it's a swipe and a press top enable a hotspot, then my laptop just connects. Much more convenient to use a desktop browser than a phone.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[drinkypoo]

I'm just talking about multiseat with long HDMI cables and active USB cables. Even that is going to choke and stutter if the other users pound the hardware.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Bert64]

The fact is general purpose computers were always geek toys, they only became widespread because they were the only way (but not a very good way) to do certain things that consumers wanted to do. Once better options became available, general purpose computers move back to the niches.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Bert64]

Such systems already exist, they are called "servers" and "thin clients", and many businesses do exactly what you describe.
The idea of a cloud desktop is exactly the same, only the server sits in someone else's datacenter and you rent access to it instead of having your own in the basement - the thin clients are the same.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Bert64]

X11 is capable of everything you describe and has been for many years, for instance opengl support in x11 offloads the rendering to the client device in the same way directx does and has been doing so for much longer.

The problem is that these features of X11 get ignored and neglected. Modern applications and ui frameworks are doing things which either break network transparency or make it extremely slow, and features like remote glx got ignored for so long that the code broke and got removed.

I used to use an SGI workstation as a local display, and several linux boxes exported apps to it (ie things which don't run well on irix), it was a great setup. I was even able to run quake on linux and have it display on the sgi, using the sgi opengl implementation (the linux host had only a basic embedded gpu with no opengl capability).

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Bert64]

Being unable to plug in USB devices is generally beneficial in a typical corporate environment... You don't want users plugging in usb sticks that might contain malware, nor do you want them copying corporate data onto devices that you don't control.
It's actually much better from a security perspective to use a device that doesn't support USB at all than take a device designed to fully support USB and then jump through extra hoops trying to neuter that support.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[jezwel]

And it's not just consumers. When you have to tell an IT person that TCO for actually having server hardware you run is less than renting container time from AWS...

It might be, but getting users to pay for their consumption can be a massive PITA both upfront and ongoing. Putting them on a cloud based service that sends them a bill for their usage can save significant person hours that could be better spent elsewhere.

Once they actually start footing their share of the bills, then there might be a swing back to on-prem ownership instead.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Miamicanes]

Hmmm... from what I remember from my last experiment (~4-5 years ago), the big pain points I ran into were:

* Heavyweight desktop environments like Gnome, Cinnamon, and KDE are dysfunctional when running on the remote Linux box. With Windows and RDP, the remote Windows just wraps up its event traffic & passes it along to the client copy of Windows to handle. With Linux, you can't do that. Even IF you're running the same desktop environment on both the remote and local PCs, there's no supported way to transparently have notifications and event traffic originating from the DE on the remote box get handed off and handled by the DE on the client PC that you're using directly. So you lose a huge chunk of functionality right off the top.

* There's no graceful way to run the window manager locally on the client PC while retaining the ability to interactively launch arbitrary programs on the remote PC as if you were simply connected to a remote Windows PC using Remote Desktop. If you want to run the entire remote DE inside a client-side window, the remote PC's window manager has to manage all rendering within that window. In contrast, when you use RDP, the remote PC transparently delegates all of its "window manager" type activities to the "window manager" (Windows itself) on the client PC.

* If you want to use the local PC's window manager to handle the actual rendering, you have to individually and explicitly set up each and every program on the remote Linux box that you want to run so that launching it "locally" spawns an instance of the X11 server on the client PC, connects via SSH to the remote PC, then launches the app and exports its window content to the local PC's X11 server. Meanwhile, even with the window content itself being rendered locally, you're going to end up with the equivalent of a broadcast storm every time anything generates an event (like notifications to the remote PC that the mouse pointer has entered something, is currently over something, has exited something, etc).

In other words, it's kind of like setting up VMware to run a guest operating system's apps inside native host operating system windows... but ENORMOUSLY less convenient, and with significantly worse performance (because every action generates a storm of events that would be inconsequential if you were just passing messages between threads on a single PC, but take an ENORMOUS amount of time and resources to pass and process when you have a network in the middle as your communication bus).

* Did I mention yet that just about everything woven into a heavyweight desktop environment itself is going to be dysfunctional unless you run the DE (and everything spawned from it) within a single window whose contents are managed ENTIRELY by the remote PC's window manager? Forget about casual, adhoc usage via remote X11... every single thing you do has to be deliberately planned and configured, app by app, before it will work.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[houghi]

And not everybody is a gamer. The sole reason I bought a new PC was because I wanted a smaller one, so it could fit on my desk with i Micro Mobo in a small form factor case. 12TB HD and a M2 card and an NVidea 1050 card and I can easily use my 3 4K screens.

I already could do that with a bigger case that was (I think) 6 or so years old. If I would not have money to spend, I would easily still be using that PC.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Bert64]

Yes things have definitely gotten worse, network transparency has largely been abandoned by the developers of X11 and the various gui toolkits running on top of it. Most modern distros even ship with tcp support in X11 turned off by default.
A few years ago the situation was reversed, rdp was slow and inflexible and before that there was no rdp at all, it's quite sad that one of the biggest benefits x11 had is being discarded.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[mr_lemonade4796]

Photoshop CC isn't available yet, and at first it will not be a full feature set.

Also, good luck opening and running a hi-rez 500MB to 1GB image file on a iPad.

Even some modern PC's are slow with those large files sizes.

I have my doubts Photoshop CC on iPad will be the desktop experience.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[mjwx]

Yes, PC sales are not as strong as the once were and tablet sales are increasing, but there is overlap between the two groups of users, and where a tablet does replace a PC or a laptop, its just until that person runs into a situation where they need to use a real application and not Twitter to the their friends or play stupid games.

The PC power curve has been flattening for years. Back in the 00's I used to buy a new PC every 2-3 years because they'd have improved that much that the old one was obsolete. Now I can keep a PC for 6+ years and maybe, only have to upgrade the graphics card once in that time. This is for a gamer.

For Joanne Average, who just uses it for word, internets and the odd bit of working from home, a i3 with 4GB of ram running an Intel integrated GPU will be good enough for a decade... well and truly long enough for them to decide an upgrade is fashionable, rather than necessary.

The thing is, businesses, who still buy the overwhelming majority of PC's are also realising this, upgrade cycles have become longer and many smaller businesses have adopted a "replace when dead" strategy as belts tighten. This doesn't mean they've stopped buying, it means they've stopped buying PC's as often.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[drinkypoo]

Home PCs from big box stores have always been garbage compared to DIY. They don't spec them well because people who buy PCs from big box stores don't know the difference.

DVD drives are irrelevant to most people. I took mine out because all it was doing was reducing case front airflow. I have a USB DVD burner for the rare time when I need to deal with an optical disc. I have a USB floppy drive too for the same purpose. I scarcely use either. Maybe once a year or something.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Areyoukiddingme]

A few years ago the situation was reversed, rdp was slow and inflexible and before that there was no rdp at all, it's quite sad that one of the biggest benefits x11 had is being discarded.

X11's biggest benefit was also a giant Achilles heel. I used to use that feature regularly, even running remote Xterms. I stopped. The network is unreliable. This is a lesson that Google never learned, and many another company also fails at (game DRM, anyone?). When network instability breaks your TCP connection, your forwarded X11 app... dies. Kaput. You lose whatever you were working on that wasn't saved, which is always something, and often enough something you really wish it hadn't lost. RDP means your app(s) keep(s) running. You just reconnect and there everything is, just as you left it. X11 not being able to do that meant X11 was doomed.

Ownership

[fluffernutter]

How will I own any of my data if I don't have a place in my house to store it all?

Re:Ownership

[MrLogic17]

Too late.
Where is your E-Mail? Not many regular users have full POP clients anymore.

That just one example.

Re:Ownership

[b0s0z0ku]

My email is both on the Internet and saved locally via an IMAP client. Most business users do the same, except with Outlook. Of course, email uses the Internet by necessity. There's no operational necessity to save locally-edited documents on Someone Else's Computer(tm), despite what Nerdella may want...

Re:Ownership

[fluffernutter]

Google accepts IMAP and POP. Every provider I have had with email has accepted IMAP and POP.

Why would anyone use a browser to check their mail unless absolutely desperate? We lost several important emails years ago because MS decided to shut down our hotmail account. Later, we moved and had to use a different provider and had to check mail that was in the old provider. You pretty much have to keep mail locally if you want to keep it.

Re:Ownership

[shoor]

Email is kind of a special case. It's not necessarily something that I want preserved, though sometimes it is nice to be able to go back and check on an old email. If it was something I really cared about, I could and would save it to my computer.

What I can't see myself doing is depending on the cloud, or trusting the cloud. However, I'm a techie, not a layman. That gives me options that a lot of people don't have.

Re:Ownership

[Pitawg]

My email is on my email server with IMAP access from my desktops, next to my PBX housing all my voice-mail, call recordings, and blocklist of numbers that will never reach a phone to ring, beside my TV computer running my bash and vlc DVR with quad tuners getting free 1080i local HD using my hard disks.

Re:Ownership

[Cro Magnon]

What I can't see myself doing is depending on the cloud, or trusting the cloud.

This! I have stuff on Google Docs, but what if Google killed GD tomorrow? I still have everything on my local machine.

Re:Ownership

[fluffernutter]

Every photo have ever taken of the family is around 150Gb by now on its own. I have CDs and DVDs ripped. etc.

Re: Ownership

[fluffernutter]

You don't know how to back things up without cloud services? What are you doing on slashdot?

Re: Ownership

[fluffernutter]

As I explained, that's what clued me in that you can't trust the cloud. That was before it was even a thing.

Game modding

[Anonymous Coward]

Not happening. People like to mod their games.

Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[DigitalSorceress]

I swear, we get these so often.. desktops are dead / desktops are dying..

Yeah yeah, sure the vast number of phone/tablet/mobile users are a significant portion of traffic.

However I think these fairly regular announcements of the death of desktop computing are ... hyperbolic "outrage bait"

There will always be a place for desktop machines.. PC gaming / VR, Music and video production/editing, development, 3d modeling/ graphic design, all these things are going to keep PCs on desktops for a long time yet IMHO

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Also, quite a lot of people love to own their data. Like physically own it and don't share it with random parties you really don't know anything about. Also, the speed and availability of access is an issue. God forbid your Internet dies and suddenly you cannot open anything on your no longer connected device.

Again the talks of desktop dying are mostly a click bate.

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[blahplusplus]

I swear, we get these so often.. desktops are dead / desktops are dying..

Yeah yeah, sure the vast number of phone/tablet/mobile users are a significant portion of traffic.

You don't seem to understand why companies want to get rid of freedom and general computing on the PC, we're seeing the big lockdown with windows 10.

See these numbers, this is what they want the lockdown that produces profits.

https://newzoo.com/wp-content/...

The last 20 years software has been locked down on the PC starting with RPG's when they were rebranded mmo's and taken hostage, the whole gameplan is to prevent software and file ownership on the PC. Steam and game companies have been getting away with this theft for years on the PC and mobile, where you pay for software, but never get a copy of said game or software making game preservation completely impossible.

Windows 10 already can disable and 'update the os' to disable your games, they want to move to feudal locked down computing where they are constantly checking and spying on you to see whether you have permission to run the software that is running on your PC.

We've already seen PC gaming in the AAA space have level editors and dedicated servers all but wiped out because of the desire for microtransactions and advertising/streaming, they want to monetize the time and attention of end users and that makes no ownership for you.

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[tlhIngan]

However I think these fairly regular announcements of the death of desktop computing are ... hyperbolic "outrage bait"

There will always be a place for desktop machines.. PC gaming / VR, Music and video production/editing, development, 3d modeling/ graphic design, all these things are going to keep PCs on desktops for a long time yet IMHO

Hell, even Steve Jobs never announced the death of the PC. It may be the "Post PC" era, but he never said they were going to die.

He likened the PC to trucks - versatile machines that can do everything, but have limitations of their own, while smartphones and tablets represent other vehicles on the road - able to do their tasks generally with far more efficiency. But as you can see, we have trucks on the road still, because of their utility.

There will al ways be regular "desktop" computers. The utility is there. But they are complimented by supplementary devices which can do some tasks with greater ease or efficiency. Why watch some YouTube video on a small window on your desktop when you can send it to your TV through your smart streaming device?

Or I've seen people work on their spreadsheets or whatever, and when an email comes in, simply pick up their phone and answer it there rather than switch out of their application.

Even Jobs knew there were far too many useful things a full computer could do that he never said they'd disappear, only they'd be supplemented.

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[Iamthecheese]

Don't forget the biggest one: office software that really needs a full sized keyboard.

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[chrism238]

Surely Microsoft haven't changed their mind!
https://www.tested.com/tech/pc...

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[thegarbz]

Also, quite a lot of people love to own their data.

This sounds like observation bias from the forums you visit ... like Slashdot. In the grand scheme of the number of actual computer users out there the people who actually give a shit about their data ownership and don't want to hand everything to the cloud can be considered a paltry rounding error of users.

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[blahplusplus]

The last 20 years software has been locked down on the PC starting with RPG's when they were rebranded mmo's and taken hostage

I know, no more RPGs come out any more. Certainly not good ones.

Well, other than The Witcher (1 through 3)
And Divinity: Original Sin (1 and 2)
And Pillars Of Eternity (1 and 2)
And Dragon Age: Origins (and its many sequels)
And Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim
And Mass Effect (1 through 3)
And Fallout (3, 4, and New Vegas)
And Legend of Grimrock (1 and 2)
And (arguably part of the genre) Demon/Dark Souls
And Tyranny

Yup. No more good RPGs. The genre is dead. They're all MMOs now. We're trapped in this dystopian hell from which we cannot escape.

You missed the fact of the huge amount of mobile games that would have been stand alone rpg's in the past. So yes, many rpg's are now made only for mobile and will never get a stand alone release so they can't be preserved.

You missed the entire point, in the 90's we were getting a flood of games and we owned and controlled them, it's about games being produced where we do not own and control them with no level editing tools, modding, etc... Microtransactions and mmo's have incentivized the undermining of game ownership.

How will this work?

[b0s0z0ku]

How will this work when you want to actually do work and aren't connected to the Internet? Yes, there are plenty of places on Earth without 4G, 5G, or fast WiFi. (Even in a major US university's library in 2019, cell signals are blocked by the building, and WiFi is spotty at best.)

Satan Nerdella wants to take us back to the good old days of dumb terminals. Good for Microsoft who can nickel and dime users for everything that they do, bad for the actual user.

Re:How will this work?

[doubledown00]

I was wondering the same. Guess one of those "niche uses" will be those who use their computers from remote cabins, cruise ships, and generally places outside major cities.

Re:How will this work?

[b0s0z0ku]

There are many places even in major cities that have terrible Internet access. Also, many poorer people are on data plans that get throttled after the first few GB.

Re:How will this work?

[cascadingstylesheet]

How will this work when you want to actually do work and aren't connected to the Internet? Yes, there are plenty of places on Earth without 4G, 5G, or fast WiFi. (Even in a major US university's library in 2019, cell signals are blocked by the building, and WiFi is spotty at best.)

Satan Nerdella wants to take us back to the good old days of dumb terminals. Good for Microsoft who can nickel and dime users for everything that they do, bad for the actual user.

You'll all live in Japanese hotel style pods in the city, so you won't be in that situation. Better for the environment too!

Re:How will this work?

[kerashi]

Even when you are connected to the internet, the vast majority of land area in the United States lacks the level of connectivity needed to support something like the article implies things are going to. It's already annoying enough that games are no longer shipping on discs (a 24-hour download is not uncommon here) and I bet if they tried to do away with the desktop, the torches and pitchforks would come out extremely quickly.

Speaking of which, I have a few extra pitchforks in the barn if anyone needs to borrow one.

Re:How will this work?

[joe_frisch]

A lot of people spend a lot of time on airliners (I do), where there is often very limited, or buggy connectivity.

I recently spent a month at the south pole where there is only internet access about 10 hours / day when satellites are above the horizon, and that was during (locally defined) night when I was there.

Some people work in locations where connectivity is not allowed for security reasons.

Some off-site locations have internet, but its not trustable.

I'm OK with a cloud copy of my data (if I get to encrypt it if needed), but I need to be able to work when there is no connectivity .

Does Netcraft confirms this?

[sinij]

It isn't dead until Netcraft confirms it.

END?

[JBMcB]

1990s - Will terminal services bring the end of the desktop?
2000s - Will the internet bring the end of the desktop?
2010s - Will tablets bring the end of the desktop?

I'm guessing no.

Re:END?

[grumpy-cowboy]

2020s - Will AI bring the end of desktop?

Re:END?

[Jogar the Barbarian]

2030s - Will telepresence bring the end of the desktop?

Re:END?

[Zorro]

2040s - Will The Holodeck bring the end of Sex with Robots?

Re:END?

[DarkRookie2]

Don't know. Are the holograms hard light?

Re:END?

[Aighearach]

Not until the patent on the special underpants that makes it all work expires. Until then you're pretty much only going to see it sold in bubble cities and the duty-free at Lunar City spaceport.

Re:END?

[Rick Schumann]

Tablets are fine for the filthy casuals of the world who only need to see email and YouTube videos. If you want to get real work done you need a real computer. Desktops will never go away, ever, it would make zero sense.

Re:END?

[BlackOverflow]

2050s - how do we make a fire?

Re:END?

[aaarrrgggh]

Traveling right now, and using only a tablet. Aside from not being able to manually manage routes on conflicting up address blocks to my VPN, the tablet has been fine. Next time I will bring a Raspberry Pi along to handle that for me, and to add in tcpdump.

There are things that would be easier with my desktop machine, but nothing that would be worth the incremental improvement over the inconvenience of lugging along a laptop. Spreadsheets, word documents, even light CAD are all solved issues. The minor things that are a bit of a pain (combining multiple document to a single pdf was one on my iPad) I needed to get someone in the office to tackle, but not a big deal.

slow adoption

[RAHH]

We'll see if it will be by 2025 or not but I'm willing to bet the adoption rate will be much slower than that. I think as the mass starts to realize storing all of their work, data, porn, and etc. in the cloud only is a really bad idea.

Re:slow adoption

[iggymanz]

who stores porn locally, that's niche.

Most people's email is "in the cloud", may as well have their docs there too.

The very small percentage of us who care can make our own alternatives of course.

I think corporate america will be all over this, and hasten the adoption.

That Time of year again?

[Anonymous Coward]

One day one of these articles will be correct and everyone will forget the 100 previous times over the last 20 years the end of the desktop was predicted.

Re:Worst prediction yet

[b0s0z0ku]

Even in the "First World", there are plenty of places with shit for Internet access. Try working in a building with masonry walls and spotty WiFi, or try traveling in the rural West of the US.

No, just shrinking market

[Locke2005]

A desktop is still useful for development work; i.e. serial ports are actually still necessary for interfacing with some other hardware. But that's less than 1% of the computer market. As soon as gaming consoles become upgradable and offer performance on par with desktops, the gaming market for desktops disappears entirely (it's already doomed because it's easier to cheat on a PC than a console). Most office work now can be and is done on a laptop. And a tablet with a keyboard is now indistinguishable from a laptop. I once working on an ion beam microscope that had several PCs embedded in the hardware (one of which even booted off a floppy!); there is always a niche market for desktop hardware.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[b0s0z0ku]

Running a pill (tablet) crippled OS on a full-size screen is a waste of computing power.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[iamgnat]

And a tablet with a keyboard is now indistinguishable from a laptop.

Really? What tablet has 8-16GB (or more) of RAM, multiple cores/cpus, 500GB of space, really supports a mouse, and supports multiple external monitors? Sure there are the Windows laptops that will double as a tablet, but they are still laptops first and foremost. Show me a pure tablet that can do all those things.

Certainly if all you are doing is things that can be done on a Chromebook then it may be possible to live happily on a tablet. If, however, you actually need the functionality of a laptop then there is simply no pure tablet out there that can replace it.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Gilgaron]

A Surface or equivalent clone with the keyboard off is a tablet that has full PC functionality. I've got an HP clone and it is great having that vs a 'giant phone' style tablet, you can get real free/open source apps for the kids to play with vs freemium adware from a walled garden.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[b0s0z0ku]

A Surface *is* essentially a laptop, though, with the CPU and storage mounted behind the screen vs under the keyboard. This actually makes it worse in some ways, because it tends to be top-heavy and harder to use when you're typing on something like an airline table. The Surface is also crippled as compared to most laptops, while being more expensive. Glued shut, no RAM/storage/etc upgrades allowed, and once the battery swells up (they all do), the screen will either crack or get pushed off the base.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Gilgaron]

Yes, there are pros and cons to all the various form factors... the fold around 2in1s save you from having to find a place to set the keyboard down when you aren't using it but then you're mushing keys on the back the whole time. My point was mostly that it is a tablet form factor that can use real PC peripherals. Unless the parent post meant 'real tablet' in terms of other factors like battery life, but there has to be a compromise somewhere if you're running multicore and wirelessly connecting to a bunch of stuff because there are only a few USB C ports to choose from. To my kids, 'daddy's laptop' is just like 'mommy's ipad' except it can do more things.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Cro Magnon]

Worse, the pill (tablet) OS is really just a glorified phone OS, originally meant for a 4 inch screen!

Re:No, just shrinking market

[iamgnat]

Unless the parent post meant 'real tablet' in terms of other factors like battery life, but there has to be a compromise

I was pretty clear what I meant and b0s0z0ku reiterated it as well. The Surface is a laptop that will act like a tablet, but it is not a tablet first and foremost. I also agree with b0s0z0ku that (like most 2:1 style devices) it doesn't really do either roll well.

Your argument was that laptops can be replaced by a tablet with little qualification. If the user has to "compromise", then it is not an effective replacement for their use case.

Tablets have their place and they can be very useful tools, but the same is true for phones, desktops, laptops, and even mainframes. Saying any can replace the other is ignoring the strengths of one and weaknesses of another.

Hell, even your argument as to why desktops aren't going anywhere is flawed in that serial ports are nothing special and even a simple search turns up serial cables for tablets. That doesn't mean I want to do embedded development on my phone though (but being able to debug something in the field without my laptop is handy).

Re:No, just shrinking market

[drinkypoo]

I once working on an ion beam microscope that had several PCs embedded in the hardware (one of which even booted off a floppy!); there is always a niche market for desktop hardware.

That niche is hopefully moving to Linux ARM SBCs. They have GPIO, so with some intermediate modules, they can do the job of both the control system and the PLC.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[b0s0z0ku]

The key mushing thing should be easy to fix. Just have a removable bottom cover that flips around 180 degrees and covers the keyboard when the thing is in "tablet mode."

Re:No, just shrinking market

[tepples]

As soon as gaming consoles become upgradable and offer performance on par with desktops, the gaming market for desktops disappears entirely (it's already doomed because it's easier to cheat on a PC than a console).

Let me know when more major console games support user-made UI mods and level mods. When console games do support a stripped-down editing interface, it's usually the main gimmick of the game, such as LittleBigPlanet, WarioWare DIY, and Super Mario Maker.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Locke2005]

And yet, that's the interface that the majority of kids these days are trained to use. It's not a good interface, but it's the one any idiot now can use.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Locke2005]

An iPad pro? I believe you can run multiple external monitors through Lightning connector. 512GB memory max.

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Locke2005]

In other words, it's just like the Apple hardware it was designed to compete with?

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Locke2005]

Agreed; most of that could be done much more cost effectively and reliably with cheap Raspberry Pi boxes. But those don't impress the people shelling out a million dollars for a microscope! (Intel was our biggest customer.)

Re:No, just shrinking market

[Locke2005]

User mods are a BAD thing if you're doing competitive play! Yes, for single-player games, they're great. Hmm... do Minecraft Realms support user mods, despite running on Microsoft's servers?

Re:No, just shrinking market

[iamgnat]

An iPad pro? I believe you can run multiple external monitors through Lightning connector. 512GB memory max.

From everything thing I've seen it only supports a single external monitor, you are still limited to a single app at a time, and most apps simply mirror to the external display (though there is a growing list that recognize it and show different content). It also does not support a mouse which makes use "as a laptop" clunky at best.

Bah!

[cmdr_klarg]

You can have my desktop when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Re:So x11 and linux?

[b0s0z0ku]

Windows 7 or even XP. Updates are available for large corporate/gov't customers for a fee. There are ways to get them semi-legally for free...

Gonna be retirement homes for GenX filled with...

[bigmacx]

...Dell Windows desktops and a data rack in every room filled with old Cisco gear to keep us warm.

Meet the new boss...

[msauve]

same as the old boss.

Here's your 3270, er, "pad." You can do whatever you want by connecting to our mainframe, er, "cloud." We'll send you a monthly bill for cpu time, er, "AaaS."

Re:Meet the new boss...

[Jogar the Barbarian]

In case anyone is wondering how that last word is pronounced, here's some help.

Paperless offices don't needs desks

[haruchai]

or desktops

I'll care about Stadia..

[steelwraith]

When I actually can get broadband that is better than the average speed in Belize. Which with Comcast will happen about a year after hell freezes over..

Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[gweihir]

And I will certainly do so.

Re:Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[GrBear]

Yes, it can be ignored.. until companies like Steam, UPlay, Origin, etc. only offer new games via streaming.

Re:Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[fazig]

That is unlikely to begin with.
The main problem of cloud based gaming is having issues with latencies and especially inconsistent lattencies (jitter).

We don't have any technology that can effectively compensate for these phenomenon, which would be a requirement to enable remote gameplay with the responsiveness of a local gaming PC or gaming console.
A lot of the games kids play these days are fast paced. And while many of them are multiplayers that work over the internet, these games still have to use a predictive 'netcode' to deliver the smooth and responsive gamplay on the client machines that people have come to expect.
The tricky thing about these predictive networking solutions is that they have to be implemented on the client side as well as on the server side (if applicable, because it may just as well be a P2P network). And for them to work properly, the client side predictions also have to be done on the client side, which again requires hardware powerful enough to do this on the client side.

My educated guess here is that unless we revolutionize the way the internet works or find communication methods that are multiple times as fast as what we have now over tethered copper or fibre optics, there will always be some place for gaming PCs and consoles. Although we might see this place shrinking down over time.

Re:Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[gweihir]

That is unlikely to begin with.
The main problem of cloud based gaming is having issues with latencies and especially inconsistent lattencies (jitter).

In principle, that can be fixed for well-connected communities by placing a local data-center. But that kind of defeats the purpose and a majority of customers will not be well-connected for a long, long time yet.

The tricky thing about these predictive networking solutions is that they have to be implemented on the client side as well as on the server side (if applicable, because it may just as well be a P2P network). And for them to work properly, the client side predictions also have to be done on the client side, which again requires hardware powerful enough to do this on the client side.

And they make cheating on the client-side a huge problem. Nobody has been willing to far to generally ban cheating players based on identity (e.g. derived from credit-card), and I predict nobody will. Hence cheaters will remain a big problem.

Re:Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[gweihir]

Well, that is not going to happen anytime soon. And if it happens, I can still have a dedicated gaming set-up (planning one for Win10 anyways, no browsing, no email, no nothing, just games and telemetry can go f*** itself...) and do everything else on Linux.

Re:Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[blahplusplus]

We don't have any technology that can effectively compensate for these phenomenon,.

We already have had 'streaming' games for 20 years, RPG's which were rebranded mmo's and "f2p" games, aka online drm is the same as streaming game. Diablo 3 and path of exile are perfect examples of streamed games over the internet where you have the whole game engineered around a server locked coded mechanism that is totally unnatural, inefficient and un-needed. Compared to say diablo 2 where the whole entire game could run stand alone both single and multiplayer on the same PC.

The last 20 years has been the theft of PC games by literally taking files and code hostage on corporate servers and coding ways in games that will prevent their preservation.

Isn't this the 80/20 solution?

[rickb928]

I dabble in Arduino programming, and the IDE doesn't lend itself to being turned into a web app. It could be, but developers are probably not going to accept that.

And devs are a tiny fraction of users. Right.

So delivering apps as web apps makes sens for, what, 60-80% of users? Good deal, 'virtualize' the desktop.

Re:Isn't this the 80/20 solution?

[Aighearach]

The comparable sort of "programming for dummies" type IDE from Texas Instruments works fine over the web.

You probably think that being a non-web-app matters for that use case because you don't understand the details of what the tools are doing under the hood.

I use the same AVR microcontrollers as the traditional Arduinos have, but I just use regular C. So I end up knowing what the different layers of tools are. It wouldn't be that hard to put up a web interface; and for that matter, you can install the whole build system in an android app if you really want to.

The reasons that the desktop will stick around is not based on necessity, but preference. And on that note, even the regular more advanced IDE that TI offers (mostly for ARM programming) has a web-based version.

Re: Isn't this the 80/20 solution?

[rickb928]

Great! I'll go out and get my Win 7 and 8 containers to do dev work there, for legacy users. Until they do go away, of course...

Re: Isn't this the 80/20 solution?

[rickb928]

Will, I think of Atmel studio and MPLab X as heavy weight, but useful. The compilers are dope. I'll go out and look at the web versions.

Re: Isn't this the 80/20 solution?

[Aighearach]

No, that is a crap IDE that was created by a company that had some neckbeards who weren't capable of providing support for GCC from one version to the next, so they made their own compiler. That way somebody else maintains the GCC fork that everybody actually uses, and the company has an excuse.

But since they were bought by their arch-rivals who also have a non-standards-compliant, non-portable compiler for their own microcontrollers. Don't expect features that became popular in the last 20 years to show up in any of those.

Whereas, the thing I was talking about was TI, and their IDE works (regular offline, and the web version) with both a proprietary compiler, and also GCC. And they support both. Because they hire engineers that are not also neckbeards. So they're capable of actual work. And then they also have a wimpy Anduino-like one that works with their ARM products. That is also available in a web version.

Desktops for real work

[xack]

Try clouding/chromebooking/tableting CAD and Video production and you will get laughed out of the office. I use an iPad for bedtime web browsing, but my real work gets done on with a proper keyboard and mouse.

Re:Desktops for real work

[b0s0z0ku]

Try cloudfucking image editing or data crunching/acquisition. Yeah, it can be done, but what's the stinking point with local CPU power being dirt cheap?

Re:Desktops for real work

[b0s0z0ku]

I'm talking about computing and computers, not servers, you Microsoft shill.

Re:Desktops for real work

[Anne Thwacks]

it needs clean power, air conditioning, humans for repairs, security to prevent theft,

You work in an industry that does not have clean power, air conditioning, humans and security?

Hell, even auto breakers have all these! (The aircon is probably "fresh air", but still).

Microsoft Has Fought This

[Jaime2]

Windows as a service would have been widely available ten years ago if Microsoft hadn't thrown up licensing hurdles that made it pretty much impossible. This has never been an issue of whether anyone wants it or if it's possible, it has always been an issue of how Microsoft would charge for it. There's plenty of pent up demand and lots of sales will happen as soon as this becomes available. But, don't take that as a sign that everyone wants it or that the desktop market is dead.

Comparing Stadia to Steam?

[iampiti]

Yes, I haven't read TFA just the summary but comparing Stadia to Steam is not accurate at all: Stadia is a service for game streaming in Steam you buy the games digitally but you play them locally. They're just very different things.
OTOH since I use my PC for many things besides gaming I don't see myself using a "thin client" and running my apps on the cloud any time soon.

Re:Comparing Stadia to Steam?

[scdeimos]

Steam Link was such a huge success that... Steam no longer sells it.

Steam Link hardware sold out

The supply of physical Steam Link hardware devices is completely sold out.

Moving forward, Valve intends to continue supporting the existing Steam Link hardware as well as distribution of the software versions of Steam Link, available for many leading smart phones, tablets and televisions.

Nope

[dstyle5]

"Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser." Uh no, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

"If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS." I think the author drank way too much Google and Microsoft Kool-Aid before writing this article. Or incurred some form of head trauma. Say the company you work at suddenly loses their internet connection when using these "web" services, no one can do any work. Sounds like a great plan Steven.

Re:Nope

[b0s0z0ku]

Also, even ChromeOS/Android aren't really "desktop as a service." The trend has been towards allowing offline apps and offline saving.

Re:Nope

[bluescrn]

And MacOS seems likely to be absorbed into iOS long before desktop Windows vanishes

FA Author is an idiot

[Echo_Hotel]

"Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. "
You mean the BARELY usable for slow paced games Steam IN-HOME streaming? That product that REQUIRES you have a mid-range modern gaming PC mear meters away and requires proprietary third-party software to use any input device more exotic than a mouse, keyboard or gamepad?
THAT is your big "America is ready to give up the PC" evidence?
I'm sorry Journalists, for what i said about the future of bloggers back in 2000, please please please come back!
I know it wouldn't guarantee quality but they would at least be trained to check their facts...

I doubt so very much

[vadim_t]

At this point, hardware specs have well outpaced what is necessary to do most work. Even something like a phone or tablet is far superior to what would have been an impressive machine not so long ago. We're no longer counting every byte, processing, memory and storage are all plentiful even at low prices.

You need some sort of computer to access these services all the same, and it's pretty much a given that any such hardware can do the required work locally just fine, without the need to connect anywhere or pay anybody for a subscription.

You'd really have to to try really hard to buy something that would be only powerful enough to connect to a remote service and work as a display. In fact, the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.

It might make some sense for videogames, but the same problem exists there -- a cheap computer currently has a surprisingly decent integrated video card, which while it won't run Witcher 3 at 4K at 60 FPS, will do a quite passable job at low settings.

And of course such services always have issues with latency and bad connections.

Re:I doubt so very much

[tepples]

the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.

And that lower bound is pretty close to something that can't do more than web and streaming. Let's call it "Chromebook".

(Especially prior to Crostini.)

Huh??

[ZorinLynx]

Computing power is so cheap these days that it's easy to own a powerful desktop computer for not that much money.

Why should we rent computing power from someone else when the cost to buy it is trivial? And that's not even counting latency and bandwidth issues accessing your rented computer.

Chrome OS is more desktopy than it was before

[SurenEnfiajyan]

Strangely Chrome OS has gained more desktop features such as Android/Linux (in beta) app support and a better file manager recently. A plenty of Chrome extensions run locally. Also is the internet speed and server computing power enough to serve to billions of people?

Download caps and ISP's push there own cloud

[Joe_Dragon]

Download caps and ISP's pushing there own cloud will really hurt this. Also just wait for some one to use there system and get an $25K roaming bill.

Oh look, this article again!

[BenJeremy]

Desktops will continue for the foreseeable future.

I will say that PC sales have dropped considerably, but much of that is because there are few gains for gamers who play on 1080p screens, and for most of the rest, PCs have hit a performance level that is "good enough". There is little reason for most users to upgrade or replace, especially once they've swapped out hard drives for SSDs.

Enthusiasts have always been, and will continue to be, a marginal group; every year consoles gain ground.

VR may be the savior of the enthusiast upgrade cycle of years past (remember when we upgraded to new computers yearly?), but even those vendors are pushing standalone products.

Nope

[DarkRookie2]

Desktop are still better for gaming, multi-tasking, speed, and cost.
Laptop are close.
Phone are far off
And no cloud app will ever compare.

Scary direction

[duke_cheetah2003]

Sort of reminds me of Brazil, the movie, where everyone will just have a 'terminal' into some cloud.

None of us will have GP computing devices. Everything will be locked down, you'll be charged by the minute for using anything.

Not a good direction folks. Turn it around before you're locked in.

Re:Scary direction

[DontBeAMoran]

https://boingboing.net/2012/01...

For general office drones, this is coming.

[doubledown00]

This forum is filled with niche uses. Yes, of course this won't work for CAD / video / specialized people. Most (non-slashdot) people are already weaned off computers and use phones / tablets for their personal use. If they use a computer at all it's at work where they neither know nor care how they get their desktop, how their apps or delivered, or where their data is stored.

It makes too much operational, security, and economic sense not to.

Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[Anonymous Coward]

The desktop was always a stupid metaphor to sell computers to businessmen. Although an excusable one.

Actual computer users, as opposed to users of fixed-function appliances that happened to be implemented "on a computer" (cue patent jokes), always by definition needed a programmable open interface, and small modules to glue together with them.

Even professionals who were forced onto desktop systems, made their own programming environments.
Businesses made their spreadsheeds (a form of functional programming), and 3D designers/engineers had full customizable software (like Maya) with easy scriptability.

The iDiot generation was the first who had never encountered that side of things before. And they want to be at the helm of cultural development now. Precisely becuase they are so oblivious to literally all the things. So they of course declared everything not like iOS nor for consumers outdated and useless.

But anyone who wants to actually *make* anything at all with computers, *will* sooner or later long for programmability. Even if never before seen.

So Linux, the OS of actual computer users, is so successful, precisely because it's not a desktop OS.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[TeknoHog]

This. One man's user friendliness is another man's developer hostility. All those user friendly layers you pile on top of the raw computing interfaces just get in the way of writing your own code. So you want to run your own software on Windows or Android? Here, just buy and install this huge development environment first. Because we try to separate the users from the developers as much as possible, we can't just let anyone code around.

http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/w...
http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/u...

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[ceoyoyo]

Soooo... you don't use an IDE?

I'm not making fun of you. I code in a minimal text editor. Code completion drives me up the wall. But almost nobody else does that.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[TeknoHog]

Soooo... you don't use an IDE?

I'm not making fun of you. I code in a minimal text editor. Code completion drives me up the wall. But almost nobody else does that.

I code in a maximal text editor (emacs), but that's beside the point. The question is, are you allowed to code and run your own programs without becoming a Certified(TM) BigCompany(TM) Professional(TM) Developer(TM)?

This relates to another recent Slashdot thread -- how do today's kids get interested in programming? In the 80s, home computers would always come with some kind of programming environment by default. In fact, it was usually the default user interface itself (Basic interpreter). Today you need to jump through hoops to get things like a C compiler or a Python interpreter on Windows.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's home computers DO come with a programming environment: the browser.

You may sneer at JavaScript but it's the easiest way to get started programming these days. Oh, and the skills you pick up may actually be marketable!

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[sfcat]

Today's home computers DO come with a programming environment: the browser.

You may sneer at JavaScript but it's the easiest way to get started programming these days. Oh, and the skills you pick up may actually be marketable!

Until the next rev of the browser when all the weird tweeks you learned are now broken in different ways.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[Hognoxious]

Today you need to jump through hoops to get things like a C compiler or a Python interpreter on Windows.

Hoops like starting a web browser and opening a search engine?

Unity, Unreal, QT creator, Monodevelop, VS, IDLE, Eclipse. Free as in beer. The hard part is choosing.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[zifn4b]

Soooo... you don't use an IDE?

I'm not making fun of you. I code in a minimal text editor. Code completion drives me up the wall. But almost nobody else does that.

vim/emacs - it's only way to get LEGIT nerd street cred. Word.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[ceoyoyo]

It is more convenient than flipping DIP switches with a watchmaker's screwdriver, I'll give you that.

Um... I did this in 2001 with RDP

[rsilvergun]

It's nothing new. We got away from it because it was expensive to run the RDP and web apps did most of what we needed (with the occasional terminal emulator for mainframe stuff).

This is just Microsoft hoping to sell Windows as a "Service" so I can pay $300/yr per employee for Windows.

Re:Um... I did this in 2001 with RDP

[thegarbz]

We got away from it because it was expensive to run the RDP

Bonus points for using the correct word there. We ditched a lot of things for reasons which included the word "was". Massive bandwidth increases, cloud computing, offloading data and processing has all completely changed the cost benefit equation.

Uh, what?

[squiggleslash]

Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser.

That's not true, which is why Google has been trying to make ChromeOS more attractive by adding support for GNU/Linux and Android applications.

The bare minimum Chromebook was suitable for some uses, but very few people bought it to use as their primary computing environment. The fact Google is putting an enormous amount of work into making it a full desktop tells you that the basis of the article is... dubious.

Oh sure, Microsoft sees managed desktops as a thing, but I'd suggest the intended market are businesses, and even then most are going to balk at the concept of something that ceases to work if their extremely high bandwidth Internet connection goes down.

The Google streaming games thing also doesn't really factor into this... at all. That's something likely to replace consoles, not PCs. If consoles didn't kill PCs, why would Google's streaming efforts do that?

Re:Uh, what?

[tepples]

If consoles didn't kill PCs, why would Google's streaming efforts do that?

Handhelds did kill handheld PCs like the Nokia N800/N900. What's the PC counterpart to, say, a Nintendo 3DS? The closest thing you can buy in stores is a touch-operated smartphone, and it lacks any sort of keyboard or gamepad out of the box.

Re:Uh, what?

[drinkypoo]

Handhelds did kill handheld PCs like the Nokia N800/N900. What's the PC counterpart to, say, a Nintendo 3DS?

Companies are still making handheld PCs. They're not dead, just sharply in the minority. But they never had much market share, so it's hard to say that they were killed. More palmtop PCs are probably being sold than ever, because they are much cheaper than ever before — whether you do the math in real or inflated dollars. An Atari Portfolio was a stunningly expensive thing for its capabilities. You can get a multicore handheld PC with a GPU for less now.

Here we go again

[Dunbal]

Wasn't the desktop supposed to be dying 15 years ago, when tablets first started coming out?

We have cars. We have SUV's. We have minivans. We have trucks. We have motorcycles. No single one of them is in danger of extinction, although sales vary between the groups from year to year. The desktop is also here to stay. Only a desktop can provide the raw computing power, the flexibility, the ease of modification and programming. Try to switch the graphics card on your tablet. Try to program your console.

Now we can argue that not everyone needs or wants a desktop - I agree. But dead? Never.

Re:Here we go again

[iggymanz]

minivans are dying out, actually.

Re:Here we go again

[drinkypoo]

minivans are dying out, actually.

They're probably going to be a dominant form of autonomous vehicle. If you don't have to do the driving, and you can concentrate on something else, then it's not such a problem to let the vehicle slow down a bit during your commute. It's more efficient, since you're not fighting so much drag. A van is the best shape if you don't care what you look like, because of the usable space. Minivans are cheaper and easier to park, which is relevant even when the vehicle is self-parking — they just take up less space.

I prefer full-size vans because I'm a full-size person, but minivans have some real benefits. The biggest problem with them is that they're annoying to work on, but EVs don't need as much work. Electrification should help keep the minivan alive.

Re:Here we go again

[Dunbal]

Rubbish. You take what the cloud offers. If the cloud doesn't offer it, you're fucked.

Re:Here we go again

[iggymanz]

I'm thinking the autonomous vehicles will be SUV shaped (even if not really SUV in power or weight) for fad reasons. SUV sales since 2000 have plummeted.

Re:Here we go again

[toddestan]

Furthermore, the wagon is almost extinct, and so is the 2-door (non-sports car) coupe. Even the sedan is an endangered species, though I predict the Toyota Camry will become like the sedan version of the Dodge Caravan, and own it's market once everyone else gives up on it.

Re:Here we go again

[mr_lemonade4796]

This is a North American trend. In the US, wagons and hatchbacks are not popular at all. Now, it's the sedans turn to loose ground, and in the worlds largest markets, we see companies abandoning the Sedan. Ford is SUV only. Chrysler sells 3 sedans, some Mini-Vans and mostly SUVs. Even GM is shedding some of it's sedans in the coming years.

In Europe, wagons, hatchbacks and sedans were the king, but even their it appears that Small SUV's are helping sink Sedan sales.

Of course the biggest automotive like is the Crossover/Small SUV. Mainly a tiny SEDAN with lifted suspension and a hatchback/wagon body. Most Small SUVs have LESS space inside then proper sedan hatchbacks and they automakers find more profit in the small SUV.

It's like people only see the tallness of the small SUV and think there is safety and space. Neither of which is true.

Many years ago, the 2 door sports car died. SUV's ruled supreme and the MiniVan was everywhere. There was a market backlash as gas prices went up and up and SUV's where both gas guzzlers and terrible to drive. Mini-Vans have always been terrible. The sports cars are probably a Fad though.

Desktops are here to stay. Market is still huge even if it is falling. Even with 'cloud' based computing, you still need some form operating system and you need big latency free internet pipes. Sure, performance won't be that much a factor, except for CAD and Hi-Rez media editing, in which case you need a proper local operating system and software.

    -T-

Linux on Arm

[Crashmarik]

Completely usable systems for less than $50

Just why do I care about Microsoft ?

Re:Linux on Arm

[tepples]

Completely usable systems for less than $50

Just why do I care about Microsoft ?

Because the applications you use are compiled for x86 or for x86-64.

Wine on an x86-64 PC works well to run Windows applications. It works particularly well for applications whose developers accept issue reports reported by Wine users, such as j0CC-FamiTracker (chiptune music sequencer), OpenMPT (sample music sequencer), BGB (Game Boy debugger), and FCEUX (NES debugger). They're fully supported on Wine, but they are distributed as Windows/x86 executables because of an underlying dependency on MFC, MFC, Delphi, and Win32 respectively. A counterpart to Wine on Arm would have to actually be an emulator to run these.

There is a new program coming.

[3seas]

You rent yourself out as a user of various products. This program is really long over due. i.e. had people been doing this with the amount of wasted time spent in dealing with Microsoft while in current times of collecting your data for AI training, we'd all be wealthy as we'd all get return value for our contribution to advancing tech. Whats the program called? Anti-Catch Twenty-Two Entrapment Rental. "ACTTER" Or would this bankrupt tech?

So remember to always update so you can continue to be competitive... under the tech created and tech's self supporting environment. For they own all your competitive base and we can't afford to have all our competitive base go bankrupt.

Re:I trust everyone here has a server ...

[b0s0z0ku]

Even cheaper -- pick up a "gently used" PC from the street on "garbage day" or from the electronic waste area of the local dump. Spend $50 on an SSD, done....

When did "friendly" become an adverb?

[mamba-mamba]

When did "friendly" become an adverb? That IS news for nerds!

Can't we just....

[1080bogus]

Categorize all stories like this as "trolling"? They seem to pop up every 6 months or less and tout the same thing. The demise, the demise. *eyeroll*

A slow, steady decline of PC sales doesn't indicate the demise. Just ban these stories as there's no purpose to them other than to rip the editors for allowing it.

Ambient Intelligence is coming

[MadPositron]

The ambient intelligence concept was formalized 30 years ago with visions of it dating back to the 60's. Loosing more and more of our privacy due to the pervasiveness of technology in our daily life (facebook, google etc.) is a good indicator that we're following this vision quite by the book. Ironically one of the reasons why ambient intelligence got bashed as a concept in the past is loss of privacy and control. It seems we're doing it anyways and getting less and less control of the IT we're consuming and using every day (desktop going cloud) is a good indicator that we're right on track.

These kinds of predictions are almost always BS.

[laxr5rs]

I've been working in the software world, at Microsoft as a contractor in the 90s and several other large companies and these kinds of predictions as I look back are almost always wrong. I remember very clearly, many times, people predicting - "we won't have PCs! It will all be terminal based!" or some other various of the same. The truth? Computers are like rabbits, they are breeding. I have a phone (which is also a computer running an operating system) in my pocket, and several different kinds of computers in my life. Cloud services, for very low latency apps, are still problematic. So let's say I'm starting Photoshop, which I do often. Where is it stored? Locally? Locally on what? Or? Where does the processing for my giant image take place? So when I save an image that's 500 megabytes, it's going to be saved ... over TCP/IP? And that super low latency, super high bandwidth stuff is going to be ubiquitous enough by 2025? I don't think so. I especially love it when people make timeline predictions. Those are the best to look at an say, "THAT'S when they thought THAT STUFF would happen? That's hilarious!" Predicting things like this is almost like prophets of old predicting the end of the World. I'm not sure why people even try to do it. At several times in the past Linux on the desktop was going to be the next big thing.

Cloud based games

[Iamthecheese]

Cloud based games would let a million nerds finally drop the last thing that was keeping them on Windows. Sure the hipsters tell you the all modern AAA games are trash but the fact is Wine still isn't fully up to it and those games are the only thing keeping many, many people from switching.

Re:Cloud based games

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason we want to drop Windows is because it essentially forces us to rent an operating system. How will renting a game platform be an improvement?

Re:Cloud based games

[Anne Thwacks]

How will renting a game platform be an improvement?

It will open the door to competitors?

hardware changes

[BlackOverflow]

If and when this happens, the hardware will also start to change to this model. Nvidia and AMD might stop making 3D cards for what's left of the desktop and just concentrate on making "cloud server" cards. Where would that leave Linux & MacOS? Would those users be forced to use increasingly older hardware?

This Hyperbole

[Only Time Will Tell]

Reminds me of when I was working for a company in the early 00s that wanted to phase out all desktops and move to thin clients without hard drives that served up a Citrix desktop. We got through only about 2 departments before it was determined to be an idiotic errand. Our Citrix farm had ballooned from less than 10 4-way beasts to almost 40 and counting, and users were pissed that they had slow server connections, lost work, etc. trying to work this way. We ended up pulling most of the thin clients out and going back to traditional HDD desk/laptops. The news of the desktop's death has been greatly exaggerated.

Windows Virtual Desktop will not work for us

[omfglearntoplay]

No way would that work for the company I am at. I guess there is a niche spot for them, but it's going to cost. You still have to have hardware on the other side to run the stuff... why not get a real computer?

Re:Windows Virtual Desktop will not work for us

[tepples]

You still have to have hardware on the other side to run the stuff... why not get a real computer?

Because applications' system requirements often exceed the slow CPU and low-speed Internet available to a smartphone. It may be more cumbersome and expensive to carry the required hardware, the required battery, and the required high-speed Internet connection with you. Or because you have "a real computer" at home, but your ISP doesn't want you using it as a server.

Running windows 10 with Awingu

[fonske]

Also considering to install Igel on the clients.
Let me be clear we're still trying to manage that Awingu thing conveniently because it's not exactly managed with templating like Citrix.
We have to because of funny security standards in contracts with clients.

This crap again? The PC is Abe Vigoda?

[Chas]

People have been proclaiming the desktop "dead" for a couple decades now.

It hasn't happened.

Certain niches that were originally filled by desktop PCs have adjusted for things like laptops, tablets, phones, etc.
Additionally you saw the rise of web-based services where you didn't NEED to keep everything on a hefty central machine.
So you saw market correction.

That's all we're seeing here.

The desktop PC is going nowhere.

The install base may continue to shrink as more targeted solutions claim niches. But desktops are not going to die.

People have been calling the PC dead for years

[WCMI92]

I don't see that ever happening.

I don't see it.

[dimmthewitted]

You are dumb.

Assuming the failure of Net Neutrality doesn't cripple all of the gaming as a service options out their I still don't see GAAS quickly overtaking PC.
The US has really poor high latency connections to a high percentage of homes.

Ask the PC game modding community PC / Linux in 2019 and you will see it is dominated by Windows PC.

The casual gaming market will start adopting the features offered by GAAS, but there are limitations that will slow the mass adoption of true gamers for a number of years still.

Windows will not be gone by 2025.

Windows Virtual Desktop is not going to be as popular as envisioned.
What market share is this going to overtake? The Citrix XenDesktop and VMware Horizons remote workstations of business?

Why are they going to switch? Licensing costs?

Certainly not because of ease of manageability to domain resources.

I don't think the author really understands the intricacies of enterprise environments and the gaming world.

Yeahhhhhhh and in 2025 we will all have self driving quadrocopter cars too.
okay dumbass.

Nirvana

[Ol Olsoc]

Everyone will be a consumer, and no one will develop. There is no need for programmers any more.

Re:Exactly

[drinkypoo]

Any type of real work (i.e. "creation work") requires a desktop. Even accounting, writing, graphic design, documentation, and of course, programming. Touch-screen devices just aren't meant to be used that way. The mouse and keyboard are mandatory, as is the high resolution monitor.

Accounting, writing, and documentation could be done on a 4k TV with your phone and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. They don't take much horsepower by modern standards, even if you're being fancy. But that other stuff takes RAM, and you're not getting enough of it in a phone. You need at least a laptop. But you can still use the 4k TV.

Lots of us won't be moving to the Cloud

[X!0mbarg]

I doubt I'm alone in having my work and files all on my own desktop or laptop.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't want all my files on someone else's server, where their admins can peruse it at their leisure, combing through it with bots for meta data, and targeting ads and updates based on what they find, or worse: Police arriving at my door because a pop-up sent me to a Bad Site, and now there's a trail linking me to something completely unintentional.

Nope.
Hard Nope.

At that point, I will move fully into Linux territory, and they can just go broke not getting my money, data or attention.

How long will home PC economies of scale last?

[tepples]

No, not every ass-hat is buying a new PC. The speed/power curve on those devices flattened out so there isn't much need.

Even if the speed/power curve has flattened out, rechargeable lithium ion batteries wear out, and replacement rechargeable batteries for a given model stop being manufactured. Screens break, keyboards break, occasionally GPUs overheat, etc. So there'd still be a market for PCs to replace broken PCs. The troublesome part comes when the market for replacing broken PCs is by itself not big enough to sustain economies of scale to continue making a wide range of PCs at home office prices. This already happened to entry-level compact laptops in fourth quarter 2012, for example.

On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer. They buy a tablet because, gee whiz, it's cheaper (because the damned things are toasters).

Until the high school "introduction to computer science" class that junior is taking gets to a point where a tablet running a smartphone OS is no longer enough to support coursework.

where a tablet does replace a PC or a laptop, its just until that person runs into a situation where they need to use a real application and not Twitter to the their friends or play stupid games.

The fear is that when someone runs into such a situation, they may find it hard to resolve it. Affordable laptops smaller than 11.6" have become hard to find. Parents might not be able to afford a laptop on a week's notice, and they might end up unwilling to buy one at all were it not school-related.

Re:I trust everyone here has a server ...

[b0s0z0ku]

I freegan stuff from the street all the time and have never had roach/pest issues.

Loop

[jythie]

Yeah, and after we hit this kind of market people will start predicting the end of the virtual desktop. We've been here before, and we'll be here again, with markets shifting around based off how people are currently using technology and where data centres are in their lifecycle.

Ok I'm missing something...

[ilsaloving]

They want to move people to virtual desktops.... but you still need a device to connect to said virtual desktop.

What are they going to do, push manufacturers to start selling dumb terminals like people used to use in the 80s?

Cause that's basically what all this is. A return to the old mainframe style interaction, just at a larger scale, and with far greater consequences when Microsoft inevitably fucks up their security.

Maybe the end of the Windows desktop...

[pdxtabs]

...my house has three Macs and a bunch of Linux boxes (all of which are used for real, paid work), but no Windows.

Speak for yourself

[pdxtabs]

This millennial household replaced one of our cars with Uber to good effect, but we still have more desktops than people in the house.

If you can't LAN up, forward a port, or sneakernet

[tepples]

There's no operational necessity to save locally-edited documents on Someone Else's Computer(tm)

Say you want to start working on a document on one of your computers and finish on another of your computers. These computers aren't always on the same LAN and turned on at the same time, and at least one of them doesn't even have a USB A port with which to connect a flash drive. (A 5" pocket computer usually won't.) Nor is it always practical to forward a port to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ in your home now that ISPs are putting entire neighborhoods behind a single NAT IPv4 address. So you end up bouncing the files off someone else's computer, be it a storage account that you lease, an email account that you lease, or a VPS that you lease.

Renting a PC

[tepples]

Hell, even Steve Jobs never announced the death of the PC. It may be the "Post PC" era, but he never said they were going to die.

After Windows 8 came out in fourth quarter 2012, entry-level 10.1" x86-64 laptops disappeared in favor of (higher profit margin) convertibles and detachables as well as locked-down Windows RT devices. When netbooks came back, largely as a response to Chromebook late in Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, the smallest one could buy was 11.6".

He likened the PC to trucks - versatile machines that can do everything, but have limitations of their own, while smartphones and tablets represent other vehicles on the road - able to do their tasks generally with far more efficiency. But as you can see, we have trucks on the road still, because of their utility.

But can someone who doesn't own a truck but occasionally needs to use one rent a truck? Can someone who occasionally needs a PC rent a PC?

Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car? Is something analogous contemplated for owning a PC?

Re:Renting a PC

[drinkypoo]

Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car?

California charges registration fees based on an arcane formula, but it is known when it is actually computer and not simply bypassed that it involves MSRP, purchase price, age, and GVWR. California refers to any pickup truck over a certain GVWR as a "commercial vehicle" so as to justify charging inflated registration fees. A car weighing 4000 pounds might cost say $130 to register, while a pickup weighing 5500 pounds might cost $230 or more because you might conceivably put more stuff in it. That's not a very large penalty, but it is noticeable.

Eventually, governments are going to force GPS on vehicle owners. All autonomous vehicles will have GPS anyway, but I'll bet money that sooner or later you won't be allowed to operate a vehicle without a V2V transponder. AVs will be speaking V2V so as to know what the other vehicles around them are doing more cheaply than having to compute it all themselves, and so will human-driven vehicles. Even if all the transponder spits out is the position, heading, speed, and the state of the brake light switch, that's going to be very useful to AVs. Vehicles with OBD-II will presumably be plugged in, and those with ESP will be able to report their steering angle and accelerator pedal position as well. This is something that California would have liked to have done already, but the proposal was shot down for privacy reasons. Those reasons will sound silly when the vast majority of vehicles are violating your privacy as a matter of course, and similar legislation will pass.

When your track is logged, it will be possible to assess road taxes fairly based on per-axle weight, and actual roads traveled. We can fairly accurately estimate road wear based on per-tire load. Additional taxes will be levied, primarily against heavy trucks and buses. These taxes will be passed along to consumers when they are levied against commercial users, and their purchasing decisions will affect road use.

With any luck, they won't actually get that kind of legislation in place until I'm old enough to be dependent on others for everything anyway, but unless civilization goes down the toilet, it's coming. And probably within our lifetimes.

Asymmetric connection, NAT, AUP violation

[tepples]

The proof is in the pudding! Who hosts their own servers today? Nobody, that's who.

That's more an issue of ISP policy: how the subscriber's downstream to upstream is configured, who gets a routable IP address as opposed to a line in the NAT table, who gets to regularly take incoming connections without risking disconnection for acceptable use policy violation, etc.

Re: not iDiots...

[Monster_user]

XP was the worst OS in my opinion. I actually switched to Linux because XP sucked so badly, and didn't switch back until Vista was released.

Desktops for me.

[antdude]

Also, I still want to be able to use my computers OFFLINE.

Re: not iDiots...

[toddestan]

XP was a hot mess when it was released. Like most Microsoft products it took a service pack to make it usable. Today we only remember Windows XP as it was at the end.

To be fair, Vista was the same way. They eventually fixed Vista too, but by that time everyone was on Windows 7.

Laptop may die; desktop may become unaffordable

[tepples]

The desktop PC is going nowhere.

The install base may continue to shrink as more targeted solutions claim niches. But desktops are not going to die.

Even if the desktop PC doesn't die, the laptop PC might. In fourth quarter 2012, the install base of 10.1" laptops shrank enough that manufacturers stopped making 10.1" laptops. This disappointed those few people for whom a 10.1" laptop was optimal, such as myself at the time. People whose 10.1" laptop broke (or whose original battery and replacement battery could no longer hold a charge) had to settle for buying an 11.6" laptop and the slightly bigger, more conspicuous bag that it requires. The closer you get to a traditional laptop case, the more attractive it appears to would-be thieves.

And even if the desktop PC doesn't die, it may become expensive enough that only established companies, not home users, can afford one. This would make it more expensive to start a home-based business.

Mods in friend matches; accessibility mods

[tepples]

User mods are a BAD thing if you're doing competitive play!

If all players in a friend match are playing with the same set of mods, I don't see how they're a bad thing. Even in stranger matches, I don't see how an accessibility mod, such as one that remaps buttons, increases text size, or makes colors more color-blind friendly, gives an unfair advantage.

Re: not iDiots...

[zifn4b]

I ran XP forever without any issues. What issues are you referring to? Something that was fixed in SP3??

Cloud based games need to not become cable 2.0

[Joe_Dragon]

Cloud based games need to not become cable 2.0 with all of the big AAA games has part of the starting at $60/mo base package