Windows 365

[Harrison]

Most people will have heard about the upcoming Windows 11, but have you also heard about Windows 365?

Microsoft is taking the idea of Office 365, where the whole offic3 suite is hosted remotely and accessed online streaming. So their idea is for Windows itself to be hosted remotely and streaming to your device. You could access it from your phone or tablet, as well as a computer.

What are your thoughts on this?

For business needs I can see this being very attractive. A company can configure Windows exactly how they need and employees log in to use it. No need to setup employee laptops or worry about individual device security.

But for home users this will only appeal to those with basic computer needs. For older users that only need interner, email and word it will probably be prefect, using whatever system they own like a terminal.

But for gaming? No way. Being remote it will remove hardware as a factor of the OS. How will that work? Something like game streaming, if still running a virtual machine at the other end based on a fixed console platform. So the delivered game stream is running based on the original hardware. But that isn't how PCs work. Go brings office software and a web browser and things would get complicated. I could never see something like video editing, pgotoshop wtc running on a streaming OS, and gaming is out of the question imo.

I could however see a use for Windows 365, because I could have it as a go to OS to access on all devices with office and email, plus thr OS setup for work related stuff. And a separate PC for gaming and design quirk

[Demon Cleaner]

I don't even have Office installed on my home PCs, never really need it, and if, I will do the stuff at work.

[Stephen Coates]

I'm not sure how it would work. Would your machine do a 'netboot' (like PXE)? Or would it run some other OS like Linux and have the Windows run in a VM or similar?

I'm not familiar with Office 365, although I have heard of it. Personally I'm quite content with MS Office 2000 running on my Windows XP Thinkpad.

[Kin Hell]

How things have changed.....

I use to have all the hookey versions of MSOffice from the NT days onwards, but since Google took over, I'm just loving the lack of mess & clutter from Mir0$haft. :eyebrow:

Streaming will cause more Network congestion.

[Harrison]

I'm not sure how it would work..

If it's a standalone 365 install like a Chromebook I'm assuming you would have a base OS kernel install on your local system, but when it bots it looks for the Internet and loads the virtual remote OS.

But from what I've read you have to think of it like a VM running on a remote server, saved as an OS image. If anything goes wrong you can revert it back to the image configuration. All user files will be saved in a remote cloud drive like GoogeDocs. This will be what attracts businesses to use it because their system admins can build a 365 OS image, setup with what the business needs, and just clone it virtually to all employees. And if anything goes wrong just revert their copy. And as all work files are saved in the cloud in a central location the business has instant access like a domain, and it keeps employee files seperate from the OS or local hardware. So again very much like a business domain based network, where when you log on all the domain based applications and files became available.

It does have the advantage over a locally installed OS that you could log into Windows 365 from anywhere, on any device.

Personally I will be keeping my main OS locally installed on my PC. But I might consider running Windows 365 as well just for email and office style, so I can just drop into it from anywhete, on any system. Could be very useful.

[J T]

At work we have just moved over to Office 365 (last week, in fact). I haven't used it enough to really comment but I too can see the appeal.

Personally I'm such a light-weight computer user now I really can't be arsed sorting out installs and stuff. In fact, whenever I get a new device (which is generally a work device) I spend time setting it up so that it mostly looks and feels like the old one with my trusted bunch of applications and then leave it the hell alone

[Harrison]

Exactly. And I think that's the majority. Most people are creatures of habbit, and like their OS setup just how they like it. Plus the majority of PC users are fairly lightweight users and not gamers (other then lightweigh games). I think this will be popular. Just not with the hardcore gaming world or anyone involved in productivity such as coding, design, development, video editing etc. For that standalone installs will always be needed.

[J T]

I was thinking about this as I was driving to work. Is having things on MS servers going to make it more likely someone in AUTHORITAH could snoop at what users are doing?

I was thinking back to some of my activities when I was a more involved PC user, for instance, I don't torrent anymore, but I used to. And I used to have a few different , uh, versions of windows installed on my local machines. Will things like that become even more 'niche'?

[Harrison]

I think the days we enjoyed of dodgy OSs and demoing games before we buy have become a thing of the past for most. And I don't think that many younger games ever have. I don't bother so much any more as games are pretty cheap these days, often given away or heavily reduced. Plus the subscription services like Xbox Gamepass and Playstation Now.

But the enthusiasts will continue. I still like to play around with old OSs in VMs and using "free" versions of OSs is easiest. And anyone into emulation is obviously still doing slightly dodgy things due to copyright of older software.

With Torrents, Usenet and similar I doubt a anyone would be using a remote OS like 365. Setting up behind a firewall and even a VPN these days is the best solution.

[J T]

And anyone into emulation is obviously still doing slightly dodgy things.

I think you are painting them in a very bad light there.


With Torrents, Usenet and similar I doubt anyone would be using a remote OS like 365

Go on, just imagine what I was going to write there.....

[Harrison]

Am I?

By it's very nature Emulation is mainly used to play old video games. As such users will have obtained some rom sets. Many games roms included will be commercial with existing copyrights still in place. So it remains a bit dodgy to download them. But most turn a blind eye, unless you are Nintendo.

But without emulation or the whole rom collector community we wouldn't now have such a great historical archive of old system software. We would have lost access to a lot of games over the years.

[Stephen Coates]

Last edited by Harrison; Today at 10:05.

The jokes don't work very well when you edit the posts to correct the typos :D

:ninja:

[Harrison]

Sorry. It's my OCD with typos. A lot appear in my posts because I tend to post via mobile using swipe typing and never read back what I've written before hitting post. Just can't leave them there.

[J T]

That was a wicked pun though, I have zero regrets

[Harrison]

I'm not sure how it would work.

I thought I would revisit this topic about Windows 365 as I've had chance to test it out finally.

As you know Windows 365 is a cloud based remote or virtual PC running Windows 10 or 11. It's configured running on a virtual cloud server, just like if you used cloud server hosting. When you subscribe to Windows 365 you can configure the virtual PC with the number of vCores, ram and storage available to you.

To access Windows 365 you can do this from any system using a web browser such as Edge or Firefox, just as you would if running the cloud version of Office 365. So you can use this method to access your cloud PC on iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Windows etc and it works surprisingly well. If you maximise the browser window it's just like you are running a real Windows 11 PC.

I tested this with Linux with a recent Ubuntu distro and it worked fine. My USB headphones refused to work though. There seems to be a BT issue between Linux and Windows 365 which could be annoying.

If you want to access Windows 365 from a Windows based PC then there are 3 ways. First of the Windows 365 App. This adds the cloud OS drsktop to your taskbar, making it like a virtual desktop on your PC. This is the highest level of direct and seemless integration and will be used by businesses.

The second method is the same as for other OSs, loading it via a web browser, and this works just like other OSs, except because you are running it on a Windows PC it gives better direct access to the hardware, such as webcams, Bluetooth etc because it is working thy same as the host and client so already knows everything.

The third method is to use remote desktop client, which is the long standing way for a Windows PC to log remorwly into another Windows PC and take control of it. This feels exactly the same, and it just feels the same as using the Windows 365 app.

Tube following is an interesting article I read about using Windows 365 with various OSs and the experience.

https://www.windows-noob.com/forums/topic/23112-using-windows-365-with-linux/

[Stephen Coates]

Ah, that makes sense.

But can use use it with Windows XP as the Host OS? :p

[Harrison]

It wouldn't be the host OS, but client OS. And yes you can access it from any browser that supports it. Chrome the recommended one. Just depends on browser compatibility.

[J T]

When you subscribe to Windows 365 you can configure the virtual PC with the number of vCores, ram and storage available to you.

What's the uberest high settings you can choose for that? Is there a pricing strata (ie if you pay more you can access more POWER?)

Can you run virtual machines on it? How many VMs deep could it go? Remember that video where someone ran virtual machines within virtual machines on their home PC and emulated a whole bunch of old OSs nested inside, until the machine crashed. I hope someone does that again.

[Harrison]

Imagine if someone managed to create a virus that installed and ran constantly multiplying VMs on these cloud servers. It could bring down the whole of the M$ server farm. Although I will give them their due. M$ might not be the greatest at customer support or OS design in the punlic home sector, but they make most of their money from the business server and cloud market, and there they are far more robust.

Although it still makes me laugh a bit when I discovered that Apple exclusively use Google servers for all of their service hosting, including Apple Music and iOS cloud storage.

As for maximum configuration, I've not tried. I wonder if when you reach a certain point they start offering enterprise level VM hosting.