Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.

You know what? I eagerly await the rise of a new religion where ChatGPT is worshiped as a god.

(Who am I kidding? Most corporate execs are already praying at that altar.)

Desktops are just hardware.

Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they’re sideways are the other properties of that hardware:

• Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts

• General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them

What I’m worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they’d like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.

Microsoft devs aren’t allowed to use Microsoft Teams?

That’s what I’ve heard. Completely hearsay, though.

as I can see hints of things going wrong.

Yes!

Even if you don’t understand every line, if the system hangs or just takes an unusually long time to boot, you’ll be able to see what it’s getting stuck on. And even if you don’t understand that, you can google DDG the message and find out what it’s doing, maybe figure out what’s taking so long, what’s wrong, and how to fix it.

…mostly because they have never had to reboot their system 64 times before getting a new machine.

You really didn’t have to call me out like that.

I’ve had my system for ~4 years now, and I think I’ve rebooted it a grand total of maybe 10 times. Pretty much never voluntarily. Usually due to a power outage or needing to shut down for a hardware upgrade.

Who would join a microsoft-centric discord?

Microsoft devs, maybe? I hear they’re not allowed to use Teams to communicate at work, for unspecified reasons.

I’m not pulling it, I’m just licking it! Stop your nagging, I could use some help over here.

While we’re at it, laptops are also terrible for posture. Either the display is too low or the keyboard is too high, and as long as they’re connected, there’s no getting around that.

You’re going to need a strong, healthy back in the Mad Max hellscape that’s coming soon.

Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.

Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)

It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)

Gotta find out if it’s copyrighted, you know?

I’d say yes, but, you don’t have a right to appropriate someone else’s art as your own.

By all means, copy and distribute. Even modify and make derivatives. But no plagiarism, please. Don’t take something that someone else made and then claim to have made it yourself without giving them due credit.

Why?

Why would you ever expect anything else?

Project Farm, my beloved…

Automated backups happen at night.

No.

o5@TR5:~$ uptime
 19:59:08 up 55 days,  4:28,  4 users,  load average: 0.72, 0.72, 0.84

Some things on Ubuntu are much more updated than standard Debian, including the kernel.