this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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I hope this is effort is a miserable failure ... because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.
Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they'll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a "cheap" monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they'll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware...)
If you think about it: It is very wasteful for all of us to have local computation power at home. So many wasted resources as most people use their PCs only the fraction of the time. Same can be said for cars and many other appliances.
Maybe the solution are shared cloud resources, but obviously not owned by those big corporations, but owned by the people on a local, regional, national level?
Jeez you really hit a nerve here, with your pretty sane concept about sharing resources communally.
I guess some people really don't like the word wasteful or something.
It's quite interesting to see the reactions. I'm happy to call it "inefficient" instead? I'm not a native English speaker so maybe the choice of word indicated to some that I wanted to blame people, that was not my intention.
Maybe it's the fact that many users here are very tech savvy and would never want to give away sovereignty of their devices, which I can fully relate to. But I believe this perspective totally skews what an average user needs in computational power for everyday tasks.
This "communal computing" solution is just an idea. Maybe it's stupid and has many downsides I haven't considered, but I think it's quite apparent, that we'll not be able to continue this way forever, especially if more and more people on this planet rightfully want access to all these amenities.
We feel very entitled to our technology, and I fully think it plays an important part in open society, having access to information etc.
But it's simple ridiculous to believe that it's some kind of basic human right for everyone to own one or many high end devices for stuff that could easily be done with a 5-10 year old device.