Oh no, Microsoft made an official thin client.

I feel bad for all of the world's employees who are going to get their real PCs taken away by the IT department and replaced with a shitty streaming box which connects to some garbage Windows 365 instance with 4GB of RAM.

Seems to be some very tiny box, probably just contains some smartphone ARM SoC.

Wonder how long it'll take until some nerd breaks the software open and manages to plug one into the fediverse

Honestly the most insulting part is that it's $349.

The thing requires a fucking subscription to Windows 365, starting at $32/month. They couldn't at least have subsidized the thing a little? It probably contains chinese whitelabel smartTV-tier hardware at best.

@quad also it shows that they have no sense of humor, or they would've made it $365

@quad dual 4k with an extra type c and 3 more usb ports is probably a good soc too, they definitely ran out of i/o lanes given that the charging port is a shitty old school ungrounded plug and not even a power-only type c port, which also makes me wonder if they plan to sell this in europe given recent regulations

@hellpie they are definitely selling it in europe, in fact they already are in certain countries but only directly via Microsoft contacts.

it would not surprise me if it contains a snapdragon X chip because they signed some kind of minimum shipment deal with qualcomm and they need to move the contractually obligated chips somehow, would explain why it's overly expensive for a streaming box as well

@quad I mean it does not have to be shit. I mean they took away our proper PCs quite a while back and replaced them with Thin Client. I never liked the Fat-clients since they were noisy.

But the heavy lifting of doing number crunching (called calculating taxes) was always done offsite in our own facilities.

So now we virtualised desktop (I do wonder why we still license windows for these things so stripped down as it is)

But we at work controll all the points ourselves. Giving control to MS seems like a poor choice.

Also i hate the word cloud PC

@quad nevermind it's probably some ultra dogshit pentium-level wattage vacuum since according to windows central it is expected to ship with intel and 8gb of ram: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/windows-365-link-desktop-cloud-pc-microsoft-announcement

@hellpie explains a lot, since windows can't ARM for shit.

if that's the case might be a good thing to snag on ebay and use as mini home server.

I am unsure where Windows central would have gotten that info from though.

@stefan Oh yes, I'm well aware that there's already many people stuck in the hell known as Citrix or VMWare Horizon.

@quad it's sad but let's be honest windows isn't the one needing to care about the arm chip, they literally could have shipped an kiosk-style themed android box and nobody would have noticed, that was the entire purpose of this fucking thing, it's really pathetic that they couldn't even bring themselves to hide a raspberry pi in there because at a certain point they are definitely wasting so much money on hardware that by design they should not, cannot and will not use, a mediatek cpu with 2gb of ram would have done the job for a total cost coming in at way less than just the cost for the intel cpu i'm sure even if they got it out of some hardware bargain bin

@hellpie exactly like how many companies connect entire $500 indsutrial dust-proof windows computers to TVs just to run an informational slideshow, rather than running an app directly on the smart tv, or buying a nec public display they can slide a compute module directly into

@quad Sun did it better decades ago

@getimiskon solaris hotdesking is still one of the coolest things.

even though there were citrix and horizon capable thin clients which claimed similar features, they were slow as shit to connect in reality

@quad Microsoft innovating incredible “new” ways to make computers worse, it’s quite impressive really.

I work in IT, my default stance is that we “should stop buying Microsoft products” but sadly I don’t make the decisions

@Baa god it's awful how my company insists on buying microsoft-everything if it's available. and there's lots of companies doing the same.

so many stupid tasks done with a full windows machine with 8GB of ram when it could've been done with the crappiest equipment available no problem.

dns server?
̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ ̶p̶o̶t̶a̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶1̶2̶8̶M̶B̶ ̶R̶A̶M̶
Windows VM /w 8GB RAM

digital signage?
̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶m̶a̶r̶t̶T̶V̶
Connect an entire Windows desktop computer to TV

web server?
̶n̶g̶i̶n̶x̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶2̶5̶6̶M̶B̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶r̶a̶m̶
IIS and 16GB of RAM

It's absolutely insane some times.

And don't even get me started on all the random crap they're tricked into paying for in Azure

@quad i am assuming the reason is indeed "enterprise", probably some bullshit like "oh but what if we want to let IT control the box" and some software lead popped out of an air duct and exploded the guy that proposed the idea before saying "just ship an x64 box so they can use the same domain policies without needing to test them", i'm sure no amount of common sense would stop enterprise customers to force it to install some insane overpriced spyware "antivirus" on the host of an online-only box

@hellpie oh i can guarrantee that even if you installed a raspberry pi you'd be forced to remove it after a year because "it's not compatible with crowdstrike"

@hellpie they'll come up with any excuse to run microsoft/windows products, as if we even need NDR on a slideshow system locked down on its own VLAN

@quad Mine’s all the same the products aren’t even good, Windows DNS is easily the worst software I’ve ever used. If you try to add a TXT record and you input more text than the 256 character limit, it silently truncates the value by a random amount, it’s not like it truncates it to 256 it literal changes every time you try.

And of course, it makes no effort to tell you that the value was invalid.

@Baa there's so much crap whose functionality was made for Windows NT 4.0 or something and none of its behaviour was changed or "fixed" (because that would be a "breaking change", oh no)

Working with stuff like NPS for RADIUS, or a Windows VPN server is absolute torture.

And all of Microsoft's documentation is so god awful and verbose. I swear it must all be written by Indians who get paid per word or something. Ironically the only thing I ever consider using Copilot for is parsing through Microsoft's own useless documentation

@Baa The worst is probably how you have to "harden" everything. Windows sysadmins usually don't realize that this is mostly a Windows issue, because most features on Windows will be enabled with security settings from 1997. Other OSes will typically set sane defaults when you enable a feature or install something.

@Baa I mean look at this opening passage from Microsoft's own documentation.

SO CHANGE THEM TO SOMETHING SECURE THEN

@quad @Baa Haha wow, meanwhile yeah on distros side of things they would either throw that shit away or at least patch it to reasonable $current_year defaults.

@lanodan @Baa Even if their defaults aren't perfect, they'd usually be more up to date or documented.

If you set up a Windows VPN server today according to their own documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-access/get-started-install-ras-as-vpn

Which they claim was updated this summer (I'm fairly sure all of those dates are fake but I won't rant about it now), then you will still get a VPN server with DES3 plugged into the internet. Their documentation does not even reference any cryptographic settings or link to the document that tells you how to fix the awful defaults.

The only thing they say is "Don't use PPTP" (I think PPTP was the default instead of IKEv2 until surprisingly recently).

@quad @Baa Source of the thing is github so yeah it got updated but yikes…

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windowsserverdocs/commits/main/WindowsServerDocs/remote/remote-access/get-started-install-ras-as-vpn.md

@lanodan @Baa Well yeah I know, my point was that any important content in the text is never updated.

They seem to make pointless formatting changes and similar to bump the date.

I have found pages in their docs this year which reference Windows Server 2008 as the most recent version, yet claim to have been revised in 2024

@quad My favourite help page is the “Azure Information Protection” AKA page, they renamed a product so many times they had to create a help page to just list all the different ways it might be referred to: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/information-protection/aka

@Baa Yeah I know, it's also one of the most cursed services ever. Azure RMS is basically a voluntary cryptolocker which encrypts all your stuff, you then trust all the private keys to Azure, after which you install a client that promises to decrypt all your important stuff when you auth

yeah no thanks

@Baa @quad Like SCCM. Microsoft Endpoint Manager now?

@Legion495 @Baa SCCM hasn't been renamed that many times.

But Intune has. I think it was renamed to Endpoint Manager, then back to Intune, then back to Endpoint Manager, and then back to Intune, like 5 times or something.

I honestly have no idea what its name is now, you see it referred to as both "Microsoft Intune" and "Microsoft Endpoint Manager" all over the place.

Which is an especially funny situation, because it hasn't been renamed much, it's just flip-flopped between two names.

Heck they renamed Azure AD to Entra not too long ago I think? Sometimes I see "Entra" and sometimes "Entra ID" and I haven't spent the braincells yet to figure out if they're the same product or not

@quad @Baa I wonder who called it RMS/"Rights Management Services" because it seems like a troll towards Gnu.

@lanodan @Baa i dunno, but microsoft really does treat their names as if they were internet standards

@quad @lanodan One of my favourite branding moves was Microsoft’s re-brand of Lync, their enterprise chat service, an established, well-known and as far as I know, fairly decent chat software for business.

After microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5 Billion I guess they needed to justify it somehow, so they branded Lync to Skype… For Business. I don’t know how much cocaine the brain-dead marketing team must’ve been on to come up with that one but it’s always felt the most jarring rebrand I’ve ever known.

Anyway after they ran Skype’s reputation into the ground by removing every good feature and packing it full of Ads, Skype For Business just wasn’t competing against other chat software like Discord and Slack sot hey go and release Teams.

Which is somehow ten times worse than Skype ever became, and then they immediately deprecated SFB before bothering to make Teams an actually decent product, now we’re 4 years into it and Teams has almost become bearable and I guess those $8.5 Billion are a write-off???

@Baa @lanodan This rebrand was an absolute nightmare.

So much confusion from both sides. I must have been called by HR at least 10 times wondering why they can't call the person they're supposed to interview even though both people have Skype.

@Baa @lanodan Also in regards to Teams, it was so bloated and slow that it wasn't funny.

Then they rewrote it to use Edge WebView2 and became 4 times as fast. But after a year or two of that it's now almost as slow again. They didn't improve performance at all, they just made more headroom for new bloat.

I am genuinely impressed with how bad Teams is.

@quad @lanodan I cannot stress to people enough that software made by the world’s largest and most successful tech company must, at an absolutely bear minimum, must be usable, and it’s so far from that it’s not even funny, and to be honest I expect it to be PERFECT. It costs a fucking FORTUNE it had better be PERFECT BUT IT’S NOT IT’S SHIT IT’S ALL FUCKING SHIT I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE

I’m currently messing with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, which is their new way of querying any and all data from Microsoft 365. With the release of this pretty new SDK they immediately deprecated every PowerShell SDK it surpassed, such as the Intune SDK etc.

The problem is, it’s basically auto-generated from their HTTP API and for some reason they generated the documentation too. It all starts off pretty good with things like the getting started and Get-MgUser command, docs look decent: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.users/get-mguser?view=graph-powershell-1.0

But once you get to something deeper, like for example say I want to see all roles in Intune and get the membership of said roles.
First, I have to find out what the command is called, and the best way to do that is to open the Intune Portal, go to the roles page, open the developer tools, click refresh and check each request until I find the one querying the API. Then I take that URI and run it through Find-MgGraphCommand -Uri <URI HERE> and it returns me the command, which is absurd it looks like this:
Get-MgDeviceManagementRoleAssignment

This command will return a list of IDs that are “Role Assignments” to find out what those Role Assignments contain you now take that output, put it in a loop and run the same command but this time you pass through individual IDs. But what switch will you use to pass through an ID? -id? That would make sense, right? All other commands in history have used -id. No. It’s auto-generated, the switch is DeviceAndAppManagementRoleAssignmentId

Get-MgDeviceManagementRoleAssignment -DeviceAndAppManagementRoleAssignmentId <ID HERE>

Then you take each output, get any useful data which is inside AdditionalProperties and run it through something like Get-MgDeviceManagementRoleAssignmentRoleDefinition to find the membership of said role, and then it just goes down and down until you’re like 6 commands deep and all you wanted was a list of users that previouisly would’ve been something like Get-IntuneRoleMembership -Recurse and I’m tearing my eyeballs out because tHE LARGEST TECH COMPANY IN THE WORLD IS INCAPABLE OF MAKING LIFE EASIER FOR ANYONE

@quad @lanodan Oh I forgot to mention the supporting documentation for these commands is abysmal:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.devicemanagement.administration/get-mgdevicemanagementroleassignmentroledefinition?view=graph-powershell-1.0

Some of it is just broken

@Baa @lanodan Frankly, PowerShell as a whole is the most useless shell. It tries to be somewhere between a shell and an object oriented programming language, which just means it sucks at both. And the entire Verb-Noun thing is absolute madness. The fact that I have to read their awful docs to find a basic command is inexcuable when competing platforms like linux allow you to just "<command> --help" or "man <command>".

While I don't script much in PowerShell (intentionally, i snuck cygwin onto my work machine and use *nix versions of their tools or bash scripts where possible) it's ridiculous that I still cannot get any use out of the Get-Help command. I can barely remember half your product names, and now you expect me to guess the cmdlet names of the tools which speak with those products? If I don't I have to wade through massive lists of installed modules, verbs and nouns? No fucking shot.

IT departments use Microsoft junk only because of how easy it is to plug together (or at least until you get into the weeds). The only reason Microsoft is so large is because sysadmins want to save themselves 10% of their time and are unwilling to learn any new skills, even though it probably kills 25% of the company's productivity instead.

Imagine how much better some of these companies could run if they had used products which weren't ass.

I only know of like 4 people in our 1000+ people conglomerate who thinks SharePoint is useful, or who uses OneDrive for anything except sharing stuff too large for E-mail. If we had an actually useful collaboration platform like Nextcloud, maybe people would actually touch it once in a while. Even if it would be a bit of extra work for the IT department, and require a little higher competence from them to plug it into the rest of the Microsoft system.

@quad @lanodan I’m so tired of it all, I want a job where I don’t work with Windows, or anything Microsoft make.

I want to maintain Linux and Nginx

@Baa @lanodan I honestly dunno what I want. Most of the Linux jobs here in Norway at least are just datacenter techs doing the same thing on loop for 24/7, or they're consultants who help run corporate crapware which has butchered a *nix OS, like Citrix NetScaler, Oracle databases or IBM junk.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg, I don't want to work with Windows. But I dunno if I want to work with Linux until I can get a less depressing job either.