I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!

And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don’t want you to leave, they don’t want you to “be done”, they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that’s part of what they sell to advertisers.

Awesome! Dang, Second Life… we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣

Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!

For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).

I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I’m back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.

I use the same as you for virtuals(os-mainFunction), and similar for physical (brand-lpt/dsk/srv-mainUsage - Len-lpt-VR1, Srfc7-work, hp-srv-pve1).
I am boring like that.
I also don’t name vehicles.

Dell had a Linux line some years ago where everything worked out of the box, never got the popularity needed to keep it alive.

System76 has Pop!_OS so that they can provide great out of the box experience with their computers, but they are not as big as other vendors.

A good way to really get a product like that to mass market is to make it available in general stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Etc.), the problem is that most of those customers will not understand why their system is so different and they cannot install that MS Office 2003 they have always used, or that Norton Antivirus that their cousin’s son recommended to them 10 years ago that was working fine on their old computer.

And then you have the younger generations that use every other device but a computer. They’d rather do all their school and college work on their phones and tablets rather than open a laptop, if they even know how to use a computer (you’d be surprised how many don’t even know how to use a computer).

Oracle: Hey RedHat, there’s only enough space for one open-source-crippling company, and it’s already occupied by us!

At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.

Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.

They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).

My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:

If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.

Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.

I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.

Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap and many other registrars offer dynamic DNS via API or a ddns client very easy to setup.

The average user would have the same issues with Windows if they had to install it themselves.
The only way to get average users to start using Linux is to sell them the devices pre-installed with it.
Case in point: Android.

I mean, you don’t have to use Edge, any modern browser should work. I use Brave mainly, and have not had any issues with O365. You can use OneDrive on the browser, but even if you want it synchronized to your desktop there’s a few ways to sync it to Linux:

https://github.com/jstaf/onedriver#readme - FOSS with GUI

https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive#readme - FOSS CLI (but there is a GUI for it, and a System Tray icon if desired)

https://www.insynchq.com/linux - Proprietary commercial product

I am not having issues, they just made it complicated for the average user in Win11.

And no, installing offline does not force a local account anymore, it just keeps asking you to go online unless you do another workaround usually too complicated for the average user.

Not many issues to be honest. You could even install Microsoft Edge on Linux and use that to access O365.

People is already moving away from having a desktop at home, and younger people are not even interested in having laptops, phone and tablet seem to suffice for most of them. From that perspective it makes sense to have a cloud computer that you can use no matter what device you own. Businesses are already moving this way with different types of VDI and cloud-native apps.

For us hardcore computer users, most likely we’ll finally jump to full-time Linux, but for work will still use the Cloud Windows when/where required.

For me it would be better to just have both options, and let me select, but knowing MS, they will make it near impossible to chose (like they currently do with the online account vs local account to sign in to the computer).

It’s already being used for security audits, so it is definitely possible to use it that same way in a malicious manner.

Also, there are companies like Lakera (creators of the Gandalf prompt injection challenge) offering products to sanitize and secure LLMs, so there is a market for it, because the risks are definitely there.