Well, that's kinda silly.

Story: Is This the Death of the Client Operating System?Total Replies: 0
Author Content
cr

Nov 12, 2006
9:34 PM EDT
The desktop/laptop machine will persist, I think, as long as there are computers, for the same reason that Americans still prefer to drive their own cars: because there's nobody else at their starting-point heading towards the same destination they want to go to at the same time as they do. Some of those 'single-driver computers' will be in offices for the same reason that there are delivery vans as well as freight trains: businesses want to get there expeditiously too.

Not to say that there won't be more thin-client setups, because they'll be just right in more and more situations as the setup gets easier and the network gets faster (that bit is important, because my experience on a workstation at Sun, using NFS shares for most of the Unix tree, is that "the network is the bottleneck"). Network speed and availabilty will have even more impact on network-based applications, but there'll be more and more of those too, though "browser as mini-desktop" will get old fast for those who have to work through them all day. And virtualization can only get more popular as it gets commoditized, now that the hardware is big/fast/deep enough to support it.

Whether you're working or playing at the keyboard, though, it eventually boils down to a "desktop" workspace, because it's a convenient and well-understood way to leave open windows lying around where you can get at them, and the simpler the better for efficiency, both personal and machine. The article's Brave New World, then, is most likely to be just another trend in our Same Old Good-Enough World, which, as Microsoft removes more client money and system usability with every new version of Windows, is more and more likely to run on Linux. The sky isn't falling, you just got hit with a piece of broken Windows.

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