It's funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.

You’ll own nothing and be happy.

Buy all the ram, inflating prices. Sell thin clients and access to computing power/ram. What a scam.

"Don't you guys have internet?"

Considering this is very clearly targeted enterprise, there's probably some sector of a company that works on data that's only in the cloud anyways. They're likely the ones asking for this. I highly doubt this would become a norm across the enterprise.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

I hope this is effort is a miserable failure ... because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.

Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they'll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a "cheap" monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)

It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they'll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware...)

Goodbye local Windows with Linux having a 3% market share means entirely different market & society too, regardless of our Linux desktops that can't get new parts.

Assuming the bootloader is not super locked down or even nonexistent, think Wyse thin client levels of locked down.

I jumped ship like 2 years ago too, but kept a "windows game box" i5 8500 with an rx6400 to play.

The sff (usff?) thinkcentre 6500t with linux is so good it's insane. Somewhere 6-9 months ago I just stopped booting the win-box.

One day I'll probably switch os on it and use the better PC as my daily driver, but my quad core is enough for now, crazy actually when I think of the sluggishness of windows on a "+50%" (or more) pc...

The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying

I was on windows since 3.1, dual booted various distros of Linux the past 15 years, and removed windows from my computers over a year ago.
I would have to crawl forums to find fixes for stupid shit in windows once in awhile, less than Linux 15 years ago, but more than Linux in the lead up to getting rid of it. The thing that really pissed me off was the most egregious issues with win10/11 that id be looking for solutions to would always be changed back on the next update.

Even Steam works perfectly fine.

Excellent! It's hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)

I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It's a target platform at work, and it's more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.

I might try Garuda on the new PC we've been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I'll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)

Plasma is great, I’m loving Kubuntu.

Not the Dell one, not worth your time or money - only has Intel N-series processor. But the ASUS one may have better internals.

You can be sure that planned obsolescence can be done much easier on these kind of hardware. One tweak from the backend and "oops, looks like Microslop 365 OS can't run your thin client"

I hope that future happens, but I'm scared.

The OS is fully running on the cloud. You will be given a VM. Everything stays there. You may have to take permission to download a file from the VM onto your local device. You don't get any choice about telemetry.