[hunterloftis]

I fondly remember locally-executing software with local persistence by default.

To provide a counterpoint, though, during that time my entire family shared one desktop PC. Looking around me, right now: work macbook, personal linux laptop, smartphone, steam deck. I suspect that the workflows that were "fine" in 1995 would really wear on me today. Especially the ones that involve migrating documents from place-to-place for collaboration while trying to maintain a canonical master copy somehow.

Today, because of de-facto reliance on the cloud, "setting up" a new machine - regardless of its OS - takes me about 20 minutes. If my laptop fell off of my bike, that would suck, but I wouldn't irretrievably lose important data.

There are downsides to the current cloud-first paradigm too, of course. But I don't think it's _all_ downside.

[gspencley]

Yeah I never said it was "all" downside.

I never migrated the majority of what I do to "the cloud" and I have multiple devices, laptops etc. in my house. Setting up a new Linux install takes me about 20 minutes. Wouldn't know about Windows. Then again, I probably use way fewer "services" / "apps" than most people. It's funny, I've always been a very tech savvy computer nerd. I've developed software for a living for 25 years. But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.

I'm also not thinking back to 1995. This all started, in my memory, following the "mobile revolution" at the tail-end of the 00s. That's when more and more software that I use every day stopped selling perpetual licenses and started charging monthly subscriptions. Everything went "mobile first" and "cloud first" and it got more and more persistent as the 2010s went on.

On a positive note, there is some software that used to be inaccessible due to price, like Avid's Pro Tools, that I can now afford thanks to the switch in pricing models.

But even if it took me an entire weekend to set up a new device, I think that I would still prefer that over needing literally everything to have Internet access. It removes the control from me, the user, and places it in the hands of "the corporation." They can change the software without my consent. They can suffer outages (to be fair we can have local hardware failures too but it's under my control which makes a difference). I remember almost returning my PS4 when it required me to connect it to the Internet just to be able to use it on first boot.

[marcosdumay]

> But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.

It may be a "get out of my lawn!!" reaction, but I find modern software distasteful.

I want to use software that enable me to invent and do nice things. Not software that locks me in a pre-designed process. Even if most of the time I don't go inventing, and if the pre-designed process is nice, that difference still sores me.

[rurp]

You aren't alone. Open ended systems are usually far more powerful and interesting than rigid ones. I need an extremely compelling reason to even consider picking up a new online-only/saas or similar tool.

Investing time and energy into a tool that can be ruined or lost at any point in the future, or might turn out to be too limited, is a huge risk. It doesn't take getting burned too many times to start getting a lot more wary.

[hunterloftis]

All good points.

I suspect preferences will hinge on peoples' budgets for personal responsibility. As my non-digital responsibilities have increased, I've found it nice to be able to delegate to "the cloud" - even at the loss of independence & control.

If there were a personally-owned "cloud" setup, I would prefer that. A box that plugs into my fiber connection and provides the equivalents of the cloud services I use, with data stored locally and backed up automatically to a secure server. A man can dream.

[j33zusjuice]

Such a thing exists, but building and maintaining that come at a pretty high cost to your personal time. There’s very little that we do in the cloud that doesn’t have an on-prem (at home) equivalent. You could even rent servers at a CoLo or something and provide yourself regional resiliency, etc.

[int_19h]

There's no reason why it should come at a pretty high cost to one's personal time, though. A plug-and-play box with a well-defined API for storage and sync is not an insurmountable engineering problem. The economics of it is why we don't have one, yet.