Really, though – is that not true?

There is already no expectation of privacy and anonymity anymore. Cameras are already everywhere, more and more of them interconnected and tracking your every step. If you want privacy and anonymity outside of your own home, you need to be wearing a mask, and maybe taking measures to disguise your gait and physical proportions as well. Having slightly more or slightly fewer cameras out there isn’t going to change that whatsoever.

Okay, then. I wish you the very best of luck in destroying every camera you see. Hopefully you’re wearing a mask and unidentifying clothes every time you go out.

If you see a ring door bell, they aren’t hard to kick or rip off the wall.

It is a bit more difficult, however, to do that without being caught, since they’ll probably have camera footage of you doing it.

Eh, you’re already on a dozen cameras every time you go outside. Security cameras, state surveillance cameras, doorbell cameras, cameras all over every modern car… What’s a few more?

A set of FOSS smart glasses powered entirely by local hardware and software that you own and control? That would be kind of neat.

Anything connected to and under the control of a big corporation, though … miss me with that shit.

Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.

Desktops are just hardware.

Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they’re sideways are the other properties of that hardware:

• Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts

• General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them

What I’m worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they’d like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

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…)