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Windows-as-an-app is coming

computerworld.com

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Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#31

Post by trealira »

tester756 wrote: post #7
hulitu wrote: post #3

> Windows-as-an-App Is Coming To do what ? Running on bare hardware is a challenge for Windows.

>Running on bare hardware is a challenge for Windows. What do you mean?

I don't know exactly what the OP was trying to say, but in my experience, Windows runs noticeably slowly and is sluggish compared to Linux on the same hardware. I have a Skylake CPU and 16GB of RAM, too; it's not just a crappy netbook.

I dual boot my laptop with Windows 11 and Linux with GNOME. In Windows, just opening the Settings app takes a few seconds: 1 for the window to actually open, and the rest of the time loading the actual UI (since at first it's just a blank window). Opening applications takes longer. I can open fewer tabs in the web browser before the machine starts to lag. Reading and writing files is slower. (I recall reading that NT made different tradeoffs compared to Linux regarding file I/O and starting processes that made them slower, but the benefits to the tradeoffs they made aren't apparent to me in my usage.)

Running Linux with GNOME (typically said to be bloated compared to other DEs or standalone WMs) is much snappier in all these cases.

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#33

Post by godzillabrennus »

This article is nonsense. Microsoft intentionally made it hard and expensive for innovative companies to try and deliver Windows as a service through a browser for years. They didn’t want to hurt their lucrative OEM licensing business. This made it a thing for enterprise customers.

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#34

Post by vb6sp6 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #13
crowcroft wrote: post #9

The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.

Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would compan…

[dead]

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#35

Post by nathanaldensr »

thegrim33 wrote: post #13
crowcroft wrote: post #9

The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.

Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would compan…

Exactly. The naivete of people is astounding. We hear every day about people being deplatformed for no reason at all, and the price they pay for using said platforms.

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#36

Post by seanhunter »

coldacid wrote: post #2

Everything going to "the Cloud" is just a backslide into the mainframe era, but with shinier graphics. I feel like the age of micros has ended, killed off by clueless users with flashy phones.

That's a snappy take, but it definitely doesn't feel that way to me as someone who did use mainframes a bit and big shared unix servers(not mainframes) quite a lot at points in my career.

The defining characteristic of the mainframe experience for me is extreme rigidity. Upgrades are practically impossible, scheduling time on the mainframe requires lots of forward planning, notice or having a close relationship with a sysop that you can buy drinks for to get jobs to jump the queue.

Cloud on the other hand brings scaling on demand scale up/scale down for bursty workloads, very quick to experiment with different configurations etc. The exact opposite - flexibility is very much the name of the game.

Shared unix servers (not mainframes) were also very different from cloud in this way but also had the difference that you were always in very noticeable contention for CPU and io with other users, whereas on cloud you are almost always on dedicated resources for your use case. I never really felt contention on mainframe workloads because they are so goddamn slow all the time it's pretty much impossible to tell if you're contended or not.

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#37

Post by rthnbgrredf »

JohnFen wrote: post #16
coldacid wrote: post #2

Everything going to "the Cloud" is just a backslide into the mainframe era, but with shinier graphics. I feel like the age of micros has ended, killed off by clueless users with flashy phones.

It's just one of the usual cycles. Enough time has gone by that most people have forgotten (or weren't alive) during the last server era. They aren't fresh on what the serious downsides of it are, or why the PC revolution was such a step forward. But people will be reminded (lots are already beginning to see) and the pendulum will swing back away from using someone else's server. Then after a couple decades, the pend…

Could someone who remember the era of mainframe computing, which of the downsides could apply to the modern version of it (cloud desktop)?

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#38

Post by eddythompson80 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #33

This article is nonsense. Microsoft intentionally made it hard and expensive for innovative companies to try and deliver Windows as a service through a browser for years. They didn’t want to hurt their lucrative OEM licensing business. This made it a thing for enterprise customers.

What do you mean? OEM licensing isn’t the same as enterprise volume licensing. And the latter is per seat/user anyway. Plenty of projects deliver remote rdp session over a browser fine. It even works better than VNC in the browser.

What was Microsoft doing to make it hard exactly?

Re: Windows-as-an-app is coming

#40

Post by 3seashells »

thegrim33 wrote: post #13
crowcroft wrote: post #9

The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.

Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would compan…

Can also imagine the data syphoning on standardized containers be coming a grade a attack vector on other containers.
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