Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LuvSauce 2078 days ago
Imagine a computer without internet. It's way less useful. Everything that matters is online now. Pottering wants to get rid of /home on Linux for example. You can even do all that stuff online by SSHing a much better computer.
4 comments

>You can even do all that stuff online by SSHing a much better computer.

I pay 20€ per month to "SSH" into a worse computer and by "SSH" I mean I effectively do VNC over WebRTC. The video encoding performance of cloud servers is just abysmal. I'm forced to use 720p. Meanwhile my desktop can easily run 8 1080p VP8 streams at once without breaking a sweat. How much did it cost? 350€ for a Ryzen 2700 with 8 cores, 32 GB RAM and a new mainboard. I'm not counting the cost of the case or PSU because I already had those and there are super cheap options already. After 1.5 years (or 2 years if you include case, psu, storage) the server will have cost me more even though it performs far worse. Why would I still pay for the crappy server? Because it's a shared user experience. I'm not the only one on that server. My friends are there as well.

You know. If I actually used Stadia or Nvidia's alternative I'd be their worst customer. I'd run their dedicated GPU instances all day even if the only thing I do is listen to music with that instance while I'm playing games on my desktop.

Not all computers are connected to the Internet.

In many high-security environments, the computers cannot be connected to the outside world. And yet those computers are still necessary and useful.

Many of us were using computers before the Internet became popular and they were still very useful despite their limitations.

Everything that matters is not online. Many businesses and government agencies have data that they would never want disclosed, let alone available on the Internet.

"Everything that matters is online now"

You clearly do not use "creative" software. While you might draw from the internet to do video/audio work, ultimately the stuff happens in front of you, burning cycles on a machine directly connected to your keyboard (or, potentially, accessing some compute-server farm that is 1 IP hop away).

I want /home on my C: volume right along with my WINDOWS folder.

It would be good to be able to install Linux to FAT32 or NTFS too.

The Linux Live distributions run just fine from FAT32 or NTFS already.