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.

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.....