
The End of the Desktop? - CrankyBear
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3384713/the-end-of-the-desktop.html
======
thomascgalvin
I expected this to be about smartphones and tablets, not the resurgence of
dumb terminals.

Microsoft Virtual Desktop Google's Stadia (both sited in the article) are both
indicators of something big happening in the desktop computing market.

I suppose it makes sense. Plenty of us use elastic resources to power our web
applications; why pay for a massive server when your typical use case requires
much less power, and you can easily scale up with a few mouse clicks?

That concept translates to the desktop, as well. I just dropped a few thousand
dollars on a new development machine, but I don't need that same power when
I'm screwing around on Reddit.

Of course the sticking point will be whether or not it's actually cheaper to
use a scalable remote desktop than it would be to just buy better hardware.
Since the obvious goal of this is to ring out more and steadier profits, I
strongly doubt this will be the case.

------
externalreality
> Well, maybe we’ll still have Linux... None of the major Linux companies —
> Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE — makes the desktop a priority anymore. The Linux
> desktop will continue on, but it will keep going in the same way it is now:
> a platform only for power-using enthusiasts.

I'm a "power-using enthusiast" because I use Gnome3? Gee, thanks... but wasn't
desktop a thing despite (in spite) the so-called "Major Companies". Canonical
for one made "Unity" which was about as painful as a Rubix-cube covered in
shards of glass. It couldn't have died sooner. I mean that what you get when a
"Major" company tries to dominate the FOSS space - layoffs and an alienated
base. Red Hat was corporate from the outset, they never pretended to
otherwise, which is probably why they are actually successful and not using
millions of person fortune to put on a show while loosing boku bucks in the
background and laying off employees.

In short, desktop is not dead. FOSS people love desktops. Microsoft doesn't
dictate anything anymore.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> FOSS people love desktops

I disagree. FOSS people love webapps, machine learning, and other big-
computing stuff on the whole. Hardly any work is being done towards personal
"small-computing" and, frankly, hardly any ever was. I can guess at a bunch of
reasons why, but it mostly comes down to the problem space just not being
interesting to very many people with the skill set to do anything about it.

Big and Small computing: [https://hackernoon.com/big-and-small-
computing-73dc49901b9a](https://hackernoon.com/big-and-small-
computing-73dc49901b9a)

~~~
80386
Web apps have several advantages over the desktop, but one of them is that the
web browser provides an abstraction layer over the GUI crap you'd otherwise
have to write and the cross-platform support you'd otherwise have to worry
about. Not only does this reduce the effort required, it also means you don't
have to learn a whole new ecosystem.

~~~
F-0X
Several?

Besides UI programming and not requiring users to install anything, what other
advantages are there?

~~~
80386
UI programming and not requiring users to install anything are pretty big. You
also get automatic syncing across devices, which is nice for things like RSS
feed readers.

Don't underestimate the importance of the abstraction layer either! There's a
_lot_ of crap it's removing from the equation. You don't have to worry about
cross-platform support, installing prerequisites, trying to deal with the
program insisting that it needs MXYZPT32.DLL and can't find it when you go to
run it...

The downside is that it's feudalism. But, hey, under feudalism, you don't have
to defend your own land!

There are downsides to outsourcing defense of your land to the local lord, of
course. The lord can force updates and sell your likes to the Rooskies, and
the profitable enterprise that enables him to defend your land is the
industrial-scale farming of human eyeballs. Maybe it'd be better if 7-11
carried Snow Crash sidecar nukes - i.e. if there were decentralized, open-
source platforms that could do all this stuff - but I don't think they do.

Yet. Growth mindset.

