Re: The joy of Linux

On 11/5/24 8:53 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 04/11/2024 22:26, John Ames wrote:

On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:19:25 +0000
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>

But one has to ask what in fact a desktop OS is for these days.

>
Any damn thing you please, no walled gardens needed, thankyouverymuch.
>

The 'home PC' is now a fondleslab, TV or smartphone.

>
People have been nattering about "the death of the PC" for upwards of
twelve years now - and they're still here.
>

Yes, but they are no longer the goto for an IT illiterate consumer.
 A desktop workstation is in use by people in business, by designers, and by hard core realtime 3D gamers.
 Everything else has gone touchy-feely-crappy.
 That's changed the dynamic of 'what in fact a desktop OS is for these days'
 I didn't mean there wasn't a need for one: Just that as desktops move into more professional areas, they way they work doesn't need to be so 'chrome and tailfin'
 Microsoft is keeping the PC market alive by introducing new code that wont run on old hardware. Apple is the same.
 So the second hand market is flooded with dirt cheap PCS that wont run win11 or whatever.
 I think this will in the end drive some applications to run on Linux as well as windows and OSX
 Or windows will as someone else pointed out, be simply a certified WINE interface.
 The only thing that windows can do, but its a very important thing, is to runs specialist 3rd party programs.

   You're not entirely wrong.
   'PCs' are heavily 'game' oriented now.
   With gigabit+ internet in many places MOST ordinary/biz
   users can get by with the "thin terminal" model. All the
   real work is done "out there" on some corps supercluster.
   Back to the 70s !
   Which makes them your masters/owners.
   But few think about that. Like, what could go wrong ?
   Alas this current, defective, paradigm means that
   even Linux/Unix servers and workstations get degraded
   by another notch in the big scheme of things.
   MIGHT be time to push into a "two worlds" paradigm -
   "cloud" -vs- "local".