I had a friend who was a true believer in Stadia, he even sold his gaming PC as he was gaming in Stadia full time.

When Stadia shut down he told me "at least I get to keep the controller"

I don't think Stadia's problem was the technology, though. It actually worked pretty well if you had a decent internet connection.

The issue, imo, was that nobody trusted in the longevity of the platform. Given Google's track record, why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years? I know they ended up refunding people, but it's not like they do that with every product they've cancelled.

Edit: spellcheck

I still think it's funny that he went from working at Valve as their Economist in residence studying digital markets to being the finance minister of Greece. I think the Valve job was more prestigious, especially since the rest of the EU was committed to fucking over Greece at the time.

I'll always be able to play Balatro, Factorio, and he'll, I'd go to text based MUDs first.

I worked for a company that did this, thousands of users on Citrix.

Management didn't believe us when we told them how slow it was, especially for data analysis, which was literally the job for many of us. It turned out management above a certain level were on a separate Citrix server, with relatively few users, and they weren't doing heavy duty analyses like we were, so they had no issues at all. Middle management and below were on servers with too many users.

After a few years, they went back to "thick" clients. Laptops, finally. The virtual desktop setup was still available when I left, for a few specific things, but in general everyone used a laptop.

lumberjoline?

LumberJackie

I'd not rather have no PC.

I'll just keep my existing PC(s).

Also I guess it'd Lumberjacky/Lumberjacqueline

I've seen the term "lumberjill" (because Jack and Jill, I guess), but don't know if it's common or even in use.

Shitty ass thin client running cheap hw that can't do anything, a.k.a. Chromebook.

Yes, Microsoft is already selling these

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/link

I think that the problem will be if software comes out that's doesn't target home PCs. That's not impossible. I mean, that happens today with Web services. Closed-weight AI models aren't going to be released to run on your home computer. I don't use Office 365, but I understand that at least some of that is a cloud service.

Like, say the developer of Video Game X says "I don't want to target a ton of different pieces of hardware. I want to tune for a single one. I don't want to target multiple OSes. I'm tired of people pirating my software. I can reduce cheating. I'm just going to release for a single cloud platform."

Nobody is going to take your hardware away. And you can probably keep running Linux or whatever. But...not all the new software you want to use may be something that you can run locally, if it isn't released for your platform. Maybe you'll use some kind of thin-client software

think telnet, ssh, RDP, VNC, etc for past iterations of this

to use that software remotely on your Thinkpad. But...can't run it yourself.

If it happens, I think that that's what you'd see. More and more software would just be available only to run remotely. Phones and PCs would still exist, but they'd increasingly run a thin client, not run software locally. Same way a lot of software migrated to web services that we use with a Web browser, but with a protocol and software more aimed at low-latency, high-bandwidth use. Nobody would ban existing local software, but a lot of it would stagnate. A lot of new and exciting stuff would only be available as an online service. More and more people would buy computers that are only really suitable for use as a thin client

fewer resources, closer to a smartphone than what we conventionally think of as a computer.

EDIT: I'd add that this is basically the scenario that the AGPL is aimed at dealing with. The concern was that people would just run open-source software as a service. They could build on that base, make their own improvements. They'd never release binaries to end users, so they wouldn't hit the traditional GPL's obligation to release source to anyone who gets the binary. The AGPL requires source distribution to people who even just use the software.

Yeah its their cash engine they use for funding everything else so they can monopolise everything else by undercutting everyone

The funny part will be when citrix takes 70% of their profits for using stuff it's had patented for decades

Not quite, he doesn't demean himself by 'buying' anything, he just built a place where other people can buy stuff for a dollar and sell it for two, and Jeff takes a cut.

Live on. We need manpower to fight the upcoming fight. Every person counts.

Don't die for nothing. Die for something.

This is increasingly possible, I've seen people fab their own chips at home

Why not 11?

There's reasons for thin clients and cloud computing. It should absolutely not be in the hands of greedy companies though.

Plan9