The Windows 365 Link is a small black box that connects over the internet to a Windows 365 Cloud PC running in the Azure cloud. Microsoft has priced it at $349 (£349), and its real utility is to those fully invested in Microsoft’s cloudy vision.
The Windows 365 Link is a small black box that connects over the internet to a Windows 365 Cloud PC running in the Azure cloud. Microsoft has priced it at $349 (£349), and its real utility is to those fully invested in Microsoft’s cloudy vision.
aka a thin-client
Yeah I love how people are panning it and laughing, but thin clients are bread and butter to most enterprises. I think we have around 1,800 deployed at last count. The price is competitive and if you’ve gone all in on the Microsoft ecosystem it makes sense.
The circle of computing: thin-thick-thin-thick-thin
Absolutely. These existed years ago, I remember putting them in for a client. I also put in Sun Java Stations for another client. Neither of these were “cloud” but they were both running what we now call commonly Virtual Desktop Environments (VDI) from on-premises servers.
What is their endgame here? Why do people want this also
They are (can be) cheap. Dependent on whatever remote desktop service you use, though.
For simple office work, you don’t really need much to stand up a set of thin clients other than a good network and peripheral hardware.
A Dell thin client goes for like $300-500 while a full desktop is $1000-1500 from them (actual prices may vary by company contract), so it’s typically less upfront cost, especially if your company is already using a remote desktop service.
The remote desktop aspect is nice in a few ways, can use whatever thin client and all your stuff is there, but you lose out on stuff like GPU acceleration and at least where I worked where we mainly used thin clients, can be very laggy compared to native.
What makes you think people want it at all?
I would want it hadn’t the the divded states recently gone full fascist regime: as a software developer, I wouldn’t want to have windows dirt on my hardware, but I could test software for windows users. I had been looking in vain for a Windows+Office VM subscription before. Ship has sailed though, now I can just say fuck Windows.
If they knew what they wanted, they wouldn’t use Windows.
25 years ago we were using SUN thin clients connected to a single huge server on campus. Shortly after they were replaced with thick Dell PCs running XP.