this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Long term, there is some benefit to this sort of concept. You aren't going to have as much freedom to turn your cloud based OS into a custom build, but what you will have is a machine which will never have down time for patches and security updates. The user will be running their app remotely, using all the power and hardware of a data center, and the instance of the app can migrate from one host PC to another, seamlessly without any perception to the end user. Furthermore a user can access all their applications and data from whatever client they are using and it will migrate this session from their terminal, to their phone, to their AR HMDs.
It isn't going to be a change which happens over night, and it will be more like how car engine have become less user serviceable but more reliable and efficient. It will be a different experience for sure, but it has potential value beyond being a way to charge people subscriptions.
Ehhh we've been down that road before with thin clients. Anyone who has had to do their job on thin clients will tell you the experience never compares to running it locally
We have, and there are still things to solve before this is completely practical. This is still different than connecting to a mainframe over a 3270 terminal. A closer example of how this would work is port forwarding an X11 to a remote system or using SSH to tunnel to a server where I've ran screen. If I've connected to a GUI application running on a server or reconnected my SSH session, it is less important about where I'm connecting from. Extending this concept to Windows, you wouldn't even need local storage for most needs. It won't be practical for places with poor network connectivity, but where it is reliable, high bandwidth, and low latency, it won't be so discernable from local use for most business applications. This is probably the biggest driving force behind XCloud. If Microsoft can make games run across networks with minimal problems, business applications are going to do just fine. XCloud works great for me, allowing me to stream with few problems. That's less true for others in my family, so clearly this isn't something which can roll out to everyone, everywhere, all at once. I think it would be great to be able to spin up additional vCPU cores or grow drive space or system RAM as needed per process so that I'm not wasting cycles or underutilizing my hardware. It seems like this would become possible with this sort of platform.