One of my favourite devices that never took on in the home is the thin client. Whenever I look at a fully functional Sun Microsystems thin client setup, with Sun Rays, a Solaris server, and the smartcards instantly loading up your desktop the moment you slide it in the Ray’s slot, my mind wonders about the future we could’ve had in our homes – a powerful, expandable, capable server in the basement, running every family member’s software, and thin clients all throughout the house where family members can plug their smartcard into to load up their stuff.
This is the future they took from us.
Well, not entirely. They took this future, made it infinitely worse by replacing that big server in our basement with massive datacentres far away from us in the “cloud”, and threw it back in our faces as a shittier inevitability we all have to deal with. The fact this model relies on subscriptions is, of course, entirely coincidental and not all the main driving force behind taking our software away from us and hiding it stronghold datacentres.
So anyway Microsoft is launching a thin client that connects to a Windows VM running in the cloud. They took the perfection Sun gave us, shoved it down their throats, regurgitated it like a cow, and are now presenting it to us as the new shiny. It’s called the Windows 365 Link, and it connects to, as the name implies, Windows 365. Here’s part of the enterprise marketing speak:
Today, as users take advantage of virtualization offerings delivered on an array of devices, they can face complex sign-in processes, peripheral incompatibility, and latency issues. Windows 365 Link helps address these issues, particularly in shared workspace scenarios. It’s compact, lightweight, and designed to maximize productivity with its highly responsive performance. It takes seconds to boot and instantly wakes from sleep, allowing users to quickly get started or pick up where they left off on their Cloud PC. With dual 4K monitor support, four USB ports, an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3, Windows 365 Link offers seamless connectivity with both wired and wireless peripherals.
↫ Anthony Smith at the Windows IT Pro Blog
This is just a thin client, but worse, since it seemingly can only connect to Microsoft’s “cloud”, without the ability to connect to a server on-premises, which is a very common use case. In fact, you can’t even use another vendor’s tooling, so if you want to switch from Windows 365 to some other provider later down the line, you seemingly can’t – unless there’s some BIOS switches or whatever you can flip. At the very least, Microsoft intends for other vendors to also make Link devices, so perhaps competition will bring the price down to a more manageble level than $349.
Unless an enterprise environment is already so deep into the Microsoft ecosystem that they don’t even rely on things like Citrix or any of the other countless providers of similar services, why would you buy thousands of these for your employees, only to lock your entire company into Windows 365? I’m no IT manager, obviously, so perhaps I’m way off base here, but this thing seems like a hard sell when there are so, so many alternative services, and so many thin client devices to choose from that can use any of those services.
That’s a hefty price for a glorified steam link, especially when it still needs a subscription on top.
$349 for a Windows thin client is a good price. Most thin clients are in the $600-700 range. $349 is in the Ncomputing range which are dressed up RPis with their own management tools.
The future was probably Java applets downloaded from webservers rather then modern web apps. ChromeOS is basically the future Sun envisioned..
Most thin clients are horribly HORRIBLY overpriced for what the hardware is. Generally you’re overpaying for convenience when the product is well designed, or support when it isn’t, in which case it becomes possible you’re better off rolling your own solution.
Yeah, that’s the problem. At $700 a cheap desktop/laptop will work just as well, and people have to really want the limited nature of a thin client.
And when I last had cause to be looking a few years ago, replacements for the [large brand name] thin clients the company was using at the time were more like $1200 before even looking extra expense because of standard practice of lease agreement instead of purchases.
Enturbulated,
Yep. A cheap DIY solution would just be a cheap RPI, you don’t need heavy duty specs after all. It’s all just a matter or marketing and precedence. Such high prices make very little sense when the technology of a chromecast could be used as a remote desktop. But it’s enterprise customers who are replacing full blown desktop computers with these things, and it’s in that market where MS sees customers buying this stuff at high prices. Even though it’s insane to us, companies might still go along with the pitch…who knows.
Don’t know if you remember, but the start up time of Java applets was very long, which is why they lost and Javascript won.
I remember. I also remember Java lost to Flash first, and it took a while before JS became the JS we know today.
The long start up times still plague Java services. 30 minutes to boot the server, 30 minutes to initialize the Java app. lol
Modern Java apps have gotten pretty good now. Dbeaver and JetBrains IDEs are two modern Java apps I use quite a bit and both start quickly. It’s not obvious I’m using a Java app. muCommander has always been pretty good. I seem to remember quick start up time being one of it’s advertised features. LOL
Agreed Flash was pretty popular too.
I think HTML5, which allows all browsers to pretty much render the same in all modern browsers is also a huge improvement that was needed.
Thom, the future was never “a powerful, expandable, capable server in the basement” augmented with thin clients on premise. Most people I know can turn their fat client on, find the icons in their “fixed place” and do their thing as long as problems don’t crop up. You want these people to manage that capable server? They can’t.
So you either pay for a hefty support contract to have people on call who can fix the “basement” server when necessary or you go the route we have now, a remote server managed transparently and only a client at home. The latter reduces costs considerably. Not my cup of tea, but then I am not the typical, average user.
r_a_trip,
I for one disagree. There’s no reason people couldn’t do that, it just needs to be packaged right. For fun these home servers could be called “boom boxes”:
Want to run your own minecraft server? Boom, you load up the server appliance and off you go.
Want to have a media server? Boom, you load up the server appliance and off you go.
Want to have a PBX? Boom, you load up the server appliance and off you go.
Want to have a backup server? Boom, you load up the server appliance and off you go.
Want to have a security system? Boom, you load up the server appliance and off you go.
I do not agree with the argument that any of this inherently has to be any more complex than android or IOS. Seriously, the limiting factor is that our companies have purposefully avoided investing in consumer’s self sufficiency, it’s far more beneficial to them that we are stuck with vendor locked services.
Users wouldn’t have to run their own servers in the basement, they could outsource server appliances to a provider of their choosing, or even a friend/neighbor/etc. The fact that they are in control and can migrate to another provider is what’s important. This is the kind of freedom I’ve long wanted because it would free us from a lifetime of abusive relationships with cloud providers.
The home server could consolidate a lot of services that people otherwise have to pay for with monthly subscriptions and/or ads that add up quickly. There are always going to be pros and cons but IMHO costs will favor ownership over renting in the long run. Regardless, being able to shop around would be a huge bonus.
I still think average users would benefit from home servers if they were built for them like other consumer devices (tivo/apple tv/ etc). It doesn’t have to be out of the reach of average users…but the problem is that companies would rather we don’t have control and we remain tethered to their cloud packages.
While I agree in principal, the reality is different. All systems beyond a closed down phone OS / appliance (e.g. Chrome OS) are clunky and cumbersome. Commercial outfits do benefit massively from lock in and they won’t let that go easily. It is not only big tech and cloud providers making things difficult though. It’s also the FLOSS community.
FLOSS was to be the big differentiator and leveling the playing field for all. Except it didn’t. FLOSS systems are all high in “nerd factor” and anything that potentially makes them turnkey and easy to use, is frowned upon by the gatekeepers. All the necessary parts are there, but no one is packaging it up in a way that is fool proof, point and click and easy to use. FLOSS has no “Boom”. It only has the promise that it could have it, if only… It’s a matter of FLOSS software being deemed good enough when someone can get it to work after (extensive) RTFM-ing.
That is the problem. No one has an incentive or cares enough about average folk, who just want their stuff to work, for them to create an easily manageable system for these people. That is why there never was or will be a future where average folk manage their own infrastructure, whether it is on premise or with a VPS.
r_a_trip,
About home servers, I acknowledge the conflict with commercial interests, but that was kind of the point. Apple and Google would easily have been able to innovative in the home server market with open standards that make it easy to innovate, easy to deploy, and easy to use. The reason we don’t have them has nothing to do with consumer opposition to this and everything to do with it going against big tech incentives to peruse vendor locked services and standards instead.
The FOSS community has very little impact over customer electronics. I mean sure the kernel used in commercial platforms like android and IOS may have originated as FOSS, but in practice things are locked down and restricted to the point where they might as well be proprietary. Even those of us who WANT to benefit from FOSS on these platforms face major hurdles. You’re not wrong here, but alas this is a different discussion.
I understand that, but the reason we don’t have this is because big tech actively steers us away from self-dependency and not because it would be too unreasonable or too difficult for end users to be self dependent.
Let’s take a car analogy, law makers have protected owner right to service their car independently, but think about where the industry would have ended up instead if car manufactures had been allowed to deprive owners of the right to independently service their cars. The power dynamics ultimately would have ended up giving manufactures control over everything: basic components interlocked with DRM that prevents repairs without manufacturer’s permission. Unauthorized repairs could be blocked even using authentic parts (thanks apple for that). In this hypothetical universe, they could be having this same discussion and not being able to conceive of a world where independence is a thing, “manufacturers would never go for it”. The point of the analogy is to highlight how this is actually describing us right now.
So when you say “there never was or will be a future …”, I don’t believe that’s automatically true, but it requires representatives that have more of a backbone in standing up to the tech giants. It’s the lack of consumer protections that got us here.
Pretty certain the browser is the thin client that won this battle, sadly where the data is stored was not at the home.
It was all possible, a bunch of commerical NAS device vendors do something similar.
Sadly Freedombox is from the time of the plug computer and took a long time to get going.
Lennie,
I don’t have a problem with browsers winning the thin client battle. Although it could be improved, it’s obviously quite flexible nevertheless.
Yeah, I’m sad this didn’t happen. I think there were good opportunities for something like it to happen especially in the early years of P2P. P2P not only had a huge scalability advantage, but it was extremely popular early on. It would take centralized services many years and mountains of money to approach the scalability of P2P. P2P innovation might have been the future if not for RIAA and MPAA lawsuits killing any hope of companies investing in decentralized networks. :-/
The home basement server probably wasn’t going to happen.
However, everyone has a home router, and that could be used to as a home server. Containers would make this easy.
Repurposing an old WRT1900 as a home server is something I’m going to play with. OpenWRT plus containers seems like it could work. That was probably the route things would have taken rather then everyone owning a Sun server.
Then there are the houses which own a NAS which is basically the home basement server Thom is talking about.
I was thinking on what happened, for GNU/Linux on desktop market share to start increasing recently. I came to a conclusion that three factors likely play a role here. First one being mismanagement in regards to updating Windows to latest version, here Microsoft is doing a colossal poor job at it, second one is the mentioned Cloud and subscriptions push, as most people just want to use Windows and couldn’t care about other people computers, thirdly, and this one being most important, as said Windows users just want to use Windows and likely it’s starting to creep on them, all the forced AI. So although Microsoft was rather successful in the past, abusing their market position and using Windows as means to an end, the elastic seemed to snap. They over did it, ultimately with AI push. So it looks like artificial intelligence is still not up to competing with some common sense. Go figure.
I have to disagree on that point. Most people don’t care about the operating system, they just want a computer that works. They are there mostly for the web browser and Facebook/Instagram/other social media at home, and their business software at work. They use Windows not for the sake of using Windows, but because it’s what came already installed on the computer and it’s what they are familiar with because their last computer also came with it. They are not “Windows fans”, they just don’t care as long as it gets the job done.
Any market share gains that alternative OSes enjoy come from the last two generations growing up with mobile devices that don’t run Windows, and so some of them will naturally be curious about whether their computer can run something other than its default OS. It also helps that there are more Linux-native consumer devices like the Steam Deck and Chromebooks these days, though the latter is going away.
I meant more from the perspective of most people that do use Windows just want to use Windows, by itself. The addition of things like Cloud and lately AI, that additions only made it in Windows due to the abuse Microsoft could afford, considering they are a monopoly. It’s with AI that i feel at least some Windows users started perceiving that as being creepy. People that would for example never in their life download and install a Notepad with AI. On top of that most people don’t even understand what AI is and some of them will chose that they don’t want to have anything to do with it. In short most of the people that do want to use Windows, at least some of them don’t want to have anything to do with AI, moreover the AI push is making them extremely uncomfortable. AI is just a different thing, compared to Windows, Microsoft pairing them by abusing their market position, that will likely only damage Windows reputation on the long run and in my opinion won’t help all that much with AI adoption. It’s still a niche.
I’ve seen very few people want Windows, they want to run applications which turn out to depend on Windows because of the network effect. And in large part because of that Windows fits their requirements better than alternatives.
Regardlessly, out of this group of people some are interested in Cloud and even less are interested in AI. Cloud in my opinion could somewhat be tolerated, to some extent, AI on the other hand is proving to be a step too far and if Microsoft won’t back down that will lower Windows reputation.
Geck,
I don’t think that many users have a problem with either of these features being supported when called upon while mostly staying out of the way.. But nobody wants these features to be aggressively pushed on them be it cloud, AI, whatever. For users the primary objective is for the OS to run apps, stay out of the way and that’s it. I believe most users across operating systems could agree about this. But for microsoft, the primary objective for the OS is different. For them the goal is to hook users into their services. And it’s this very direction that is causing friction.
Indeed for whatever reasons involved users chose Windows to as you say run apps and similar. What Microsoft did is they abused this position and first forced Cloud and now are trying to force AI down on Windows users. With Cloud i would say they are getting away with it, with AI i feel some users are starting to creep out, basically don’t want to have anything to do with AI. Here i feel that Microsoft has put more on their plate that they can eat and it will come back and bite them! There is just no way that there isn’t a substantial group of people out there, using Windows, that is against AI. With AI abuse Microsoft has put them in position to basically advocate against Windows.
I prefer my “operating system” just to be the hardware, network and program manager of my computer. Done.
Do what I tell you, nothing more, nothing less, and GTFO.
If I want to be notified about email, I will keep my email client minimized, thank you very much.
If I want to use dropbox or onedrive, I will install it, thank you very much.
If I want to upgrade from OS major release X to OS major release X+1, I will go and launch the installer, thank you very much.
This is why I love both Haiku OS (as a out-of-the-box solution) the FreeBSD+Openbox combo (as the Lego-style solution). They give the feeling I know what my computer is doing and I know what the background services are doing.
I have seen a lot of customers flee away from citrix and buy those windows365 VMs so this doesn’t seem so useless in that perspective