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I can't imagine a circumstance where I would do that. It's simply a nonstarter. I need to remain in complete control of my machines, and I am not in control of anything in the cloud.

If the option of owning my own computer is taken I'll own old computers. If they somehow take that away I'm giving up and moving to a cabin in the woods.

Biggest cloud vendor wants everyone to subscribe to his services. Well yeah of course. He has to say that, it's literally his job.

But no for me never. I hate cloud.

Considering how countries are trying to push things like Chat Control, I can see them having a hard-on for ideas like this.

"You _must_ use a Cloud computer in order to make sure you're not doing anything illegal."

Amazon et al. will have to pry my tech from my cold, dead hands.

The year of Linux on the Desktop will happen because it will be the only choice for the desktop.

Well, at least for gaming It worked for me quite well with GeForce NOW. I have a MacBook can play here and there some games I like - as a casual gamer it’s fine. I wouldn’t bother to maintain a gaming PC for the casual gaming sessions I have. In this sense - yes, I gave up my non existing gaming PC to rent.

To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. (I know Microsoft had this and it was an amazing idea) For doing the non standard stuff like gaming/resource intensive development stuff I could rent a cloud pc.

Called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511477

You'll own nothing and like it. Not even your 'own' data. Everything sitting on someone else's server, free to access by whichever government agency feels like it. This is like communism x1000.

thin clients suck

if everyone had symmetric gigabit, this would be a no-brainer. imagine having auto-scaling CPUs, auto-scaling RAM, etc - it would incentivise some cool OS architecture (yes yes, privacy issues aside etc.)

most of the time i'm doomscrolling, but every now and then you wanna play with linux, or llvm, or some VM cluster.

i bought a beefy rig for these 1% events in my life, and the rest of the time its doing basically nothing. seems a real waste.

Bloody rentierists. This is what I've been realizing more and more as this "AI" push combined with rising consumer hardware prices. IMO this is an intentional war on consumers to force them into being digital serfs (like MS and Sun and all the others wanted back in the day). Mainframes->Minis (and mainframes)->Micro/PC->Cloud(and back we go to centralization).

You will own nothing and be happy.

but don't i need a pc to use the pc in the cloud

Hmmm...I'm not technical well versed but doesn't it sound a bit like the initial Chrome idea???

Yeah, he also hoped to rent Venice for his wedding, but he had to move the venue because people got annoyed. They'll probably also get fed up with him shoving his cloud down their throats. He could then move on to mining asteroids using robots, who won't be unionizing.

It could have been a good idea if tech corps wouldn’t have demostrated to be such huge POS.

The last time I tried this Microsoft killed my CloudPC trial not even 24 hours after starting it, wiping out the initial work I'd been doing in the computer I was renting.

So, uh. Yeah. I'll get right back on that "cloud PC" thing.

Seems like this article misses the enterprise angle which is the main question. I'm sure some gamers aching for an upgrade will sign up for cloud PCs while RAM is overpriced, just like how Geforce Now had a moment while GPUs were overpriced. But does it make any sense for businesses with massive fleets of Windows laptops, and might already have some kind of VDI setup, to replace them with thin clients? Would need some significant progress on the hardware.

I am kinda using LLM for code generation, but the moment I will have the chance (Smaller models or cheaper hardware), I am hosting it locally, because I don't want to give anyone my data.

Currently I am solving this problem by having like 6 AI services and drip-feeding each one with a little bit of problem so there is no context apparent from the queries.

Of course, cloud is the new timesharing.

Hasn't client server architecture been a thing for a while? I don't understand the need for this, DRAM prices not withstanding.

lol absolutely never.

Meanwhile in the cloud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620835

This is frankly evil. We really seem to be moving towards some crazy hybrid of the Animal Farm, 1984 and the Brave New World.