Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/03/the-end-of-windows-closes-in.html
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Well I for one welcome our new Tux overlords!
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Having RTFA (who does that anyway) it isn’t so much the death of Windows as the death of it as the focus of the company. Azure/Office365 will be the focus with Windows being the workstation of choice to use it on.
After the Mrs banging her head into the wall and the same for me after her linux image decided ‘what wifi’ and no amount of remove/reinstall magic did anything and then a live USB image was hey look wifi the path of least resistance was taken and a nuke it and start over was done. It seems to have fixed one her printing issues as well. I like linux but it still gives me more headaches than Win7/10.
ETA and seriously Office/Exchange is their real cash cow product. Making it work on other platforms would be awesome for everyone.
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Oh I know, just couldn’t resist making a corny joke. It will be fascinating to see what happens with Windows folded into some other division though. Linux has made serious inroads in government contracting, but Windows is far too integrated with both enterprise and government to simply go bye-bye. But a Linux nerd can dream. 
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Both my parents no longer use desktops. Their ipads or phones are all they need now.
My partner, who is a longtime gamer and computer user, now literally uses her laptop to play one game (rest are on console, ipad, or iphone), and for those situations where a mobile site is broken and she needs a real browser (which is blessedly less common now than it used to be).
I’m amazed this has come to pass, but there it is. The “personal computer” is quickly becoming the one you can hold in your hand.
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This Linux nerd keeps hoping for some proper and standard UX design across the environment.
ETA I am always reminded of the line from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook. “Unix is user friendly. It is just very picky about who it chooses to be friends with”
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Yeah, and the function they took over from PCs that became the foundation of their market success? Next-gen application lock-in…
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I dimly recall that once upon a time, Microsoft declared that IE6 would be the last version of Internet Explorer and that further updates would only be included with OS upgrades. That was a little before Firefox rose to major prominence.
(Can’t seem to find a reference at the moment, alas.)
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I can hold a desktop in my hand. I work out. I’m huge.
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How do people write anything longer than a tweet with a phone or tablet?
I have both. I use the tablet a lot, but only for entertainment, for watching video or for reading. The phone I avoid as much as possible. Writing on a touchscreen is a misery, and I can’t imagine getting any real office-type work done without a mouse and keyboard.
I’d rather have a pen and paper than write on a touchscreen. And my handwriting is terrible.
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Got a Logitech K780 a little over a year ago. It’s key action is merely decent, nothing amazing, but the ability to switch between three wireless devices, and the little rubbery stand for my driod phone or my wife’s tablet make it my favorite keyboard of all time. Obviously no great use on the go, but if I really need to type something long, I’ll be pulling out my laptop anyway.
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Since I never lay on our sofa and my desk is more convenient (3 Monitors) I never got a tablet habit. I could never quite work one in my use cases. My phone takes care of those times when I’m away or the bathroom but the desktop for me is my go-to just for the space the the keyboard.
I just don’t know how people can live on those constrained os’es.
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The thought of maybe not having to use Windows/IE at work is a pleasant daydream, yes.
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It was shortly before that that they declared the internet a fad, no? 
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I got my mom on a Chromebook, but at work, we’re bullish on Windows 10 combined with InTune and AzureAD. Someone can just log into a Windows PC and get the policy and software from the cloud. No need for a tech person to touch it other than to put it into the inventory. That’s a really fantastic combo for management and flexibility. We do have a lot of macs managed through adigy and we are experimenting with managed Chromebooks as an option for our users, but they all require more extensive IT interaction.
The ability to lockdown computers is a big issue where I am, and while Chromebooks hold some promise, it’s still best with Windows. Mac just doesn’t have the hooks to have a really robust security model that can still be user friendly. All of the application whitelisting, for example, has just been a big problem on macs and the google solution is a bit kludgy at the moment for most organizations.
Personally, I see Continuum like services to be more of a thing. Windows 10 is coming to ARM processors, so that can make it easier to just have a dock where someone can plug in their phone and have a full desktop experience powered by that phone/tablet/compute card/other. I know a bunch of my users that would love to ditch their laptop if they could just plug in their phone for a full desktop experience.
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Apple hedged its bets by developing both MacOS and IOS. A lot of long time Mac users have been bitching about the IOS-ification of MacOS, but it seems like a simple matter of survival. Back in the 1970s, everyone figured that the future of computing would be something like the Xerox PARC Dynabook. It would be size of a paperback or perhaps a bit bigger, have a screen or two, a keyboard, a pointing device, wireless arpanet, cloud storage and so on. Phones and tablets and minimal PCs come closest to this. Big desktop rigs were for special jobs where you would want to sit at a desk and have acres of screen space. Which jobs? Which jobs had you sitting at a desk and wanting lots of paper spread out in front of you back in the 1970s? How about research, video editing, design work, layout work and so on? Odd are we’ll still need PCs, but the brains will be in a Dynabook or the cloud.
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Hmm I can’t remember what I typed at the DOS prompt to get into windows 1.1.
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I certainly hope that never happens. Leaving it up to the OS developer is what drove much of the innovation that makes Linux great.
Chromebooks are linux underneath. They’re just limited to chrome and android apps.
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I use a little usb on-the-go adapter so I can type with a real keyboard on my tablet. It’s not perfect, but it allows me to bang out notes that I can refer to wherever I have my tablet on me. I do the same on my phone if I have to write a longish email. And it lets me use my mechanical keyboard more and justify the $'s spent.
