I wonder why they failed previously 🤔🤔

The Live USB disk laughing maniacally at the PC

It’s a streaming PC. Specs don’t really matter. Windows 365@4k60Hz

Microsoft will determine when the PC needs to be booted up as per your employer’s demands 😆

They offer VDI at my workplace but they are so locked down that it’s completely useless for any real work. But I know that some departments do use them. Fuck 'em.

These fuckers themselves have increased the price of PC components and now they have the gall to release this cloud-only PC to “alleviate the problem of the current market scenario”.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these PCs will have some sort of protection so that nothing other than Win365 can run. Maybe a locked bootloader/secureboot?

The OS is fully running on the cloud. You will be given a VM. Everything stays there. You may have to take permission to download a file from the VM onto your local device. You don’t get any choice about telemetry.

“Don’t you guys have internet?”

I might have skipped that cycle. Local always.

It’s funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.

You can be sure that planned obsolescence can be done much easier on these kind of hardware. One tweak from the backend and “oops, looks like Microslop 365 OS can’t run your thin client”

I’m not using it even if someone is paying me (unless someone hacks the firmware, but that’s a different story)

True selfhosters deploy their own internet

/s

Holy sheet! Looks like my homelab is booked for this entire year.

I meant that it’s quite efficient. It uses those 15W mobile adaptors for power but still can deliver consistent 500 Mbps.

I checked this route but fiber modem are currently rare. There are only few WiFi 6/7 routers which accepts fiber. My ISP on the other hand is quite friendly. They initially provided me with a fiber modem, which sucked as it was quite old, so I told them to give me a simple modem as I have my own ethernet wifi router. They replaced it the next day.

Excellent resources! Both the wiki and the miniPC! Thanks.

I was once thinking of virtualizing OPNsense but heard it’s a lot of pain during the setup and throughput can suffer. But I shall keep this is mind.

what protocol does the ISP use over fibre?

Any way to figure this out? The modem they have provided looks like a layer 2 bridge, i.e., it just converts optical frames to ethernet frames. The login/auth process happens on my router.

Honestly the network card that you will probably need might already pull more than the modem

I have a feeling that this is true. I’ll check.

Thanks for the suggestion, I need to get a wattmeter. The ISP modem looks low-powered but it can crank out 500 Mbps.

I eventually want to learn OPNsense, play with VLANs, per-device monitoring, adblocking right at the firewall itself. I will purchase a PC for the firewall for sure. So was thinking would it be better if adding an SFP to it would future proof it. But power is a concern.