Just read an item in an on line magazine about the future of Microsoft Windows 365 and the way forward they plan to take in the money making process.
The Microsoft web site suggests 32 euros per month for commercial use. Not sure exactly how it will work on different drivers for screens, printers, connections etc.
This looks like how a Chromebook works with a minimal footprint on the machine and then internet connection for everything else.
Don’t really have a question just a general discussion as to the future as you see it for paid windows services.
Effect on home computing and stand alone Linux boxes.
In our village of 630 homes only 50 are connected by fibre the rest are on copper and cannot be easily upgraded due to the ground below us. Some are swapping to using 4 or 5 g mobile connections but if they are forced down distribution of windows this may eat the amount of data use, also the reception is not wonderful especially in summer.
Comments please
I have bad feelings about this. The diretion of “paying per month” is just the same as with the Adobe products… The bedtime story is about “pay for it only if you need it, don’t pay for if you don’t use it, so your costs can be easily predicted” - but the reality is that you need it once in every month only for a small job, also sometimes more for a bigger work, so the reality is that income of the software company will be easily predicted.
I see, how people are trapped in Adobe’s subscription-like licencing, but they don’t seem to look for a way to get out, even if a one-time licence would be much more economical for them…
The same is going to happen with Windows, now with the concept of the “thin client”, and streamed desktop, Microsoft will get beside the money ALL user data, and activity - legally.
I don’t really like this to see, but I’m sure they’ll figure the way to do it, and they are going to do that.
I’m also sure that this won’t happen tomorrow, but in couple years.
Oh yes. 
I promote Linux everywhere I go - not like a geek, but a happy user of it.
I’d say 95% of people dislike Windows, but also have their excuses to keep using it, and not converting to Linux. Only a low percentage of their excuse is valid, such as “there’s no Linux app for my job”, the rest is just lazy to learn something unfamiliar.
So I guess there will be some people, who don’t want to pay for new Windows, and keep using the old unsupported systems…
Only a few will convert to Linux, the vast majority will just take what MS offers.
I whish I was wrong 
I used to use Adobe products but stopped some years back with the use of gimp instead of Photoshop. Sadly PageMaker died and never replaced with anything similar, tend to use libre office.
I am always surprised when users reject Linux and libre office because they are not Microsoft. But if you look at mint except a few colours differences everything is in the same place. They forget they use tablets, phones on android. Many also use Google docs and sheets but think it’s Google so it’s ok.
The general idea Linux is hard to use or applications don’t exist is a hard one to get over.
One of my favourite authors is G K Chesterton. He wrote detective stories, books on religion and philosophy, and thousands of essays. He argues for an economic and social model called “Distributism”, in which ownership of the means of production is spread over a large number of individuals. He wanted a whole population of capitalists, not an Oligarchy.
Now, everyone who owns a copy of the software they use, is an owner of a means of production. You are saying Microsoft want to change that so that they become sole owner of everyone’s means of production, and then lease it out to us.
I dont care about the technical details, the concept is wrong. We all want to be little capitalists in the software world, and that is healthy. Lets keep it that way by embracing
FOSS software that we all can own.
Have you looked at Scribus?
Radically different to Adobe, but may be a better way of doing things.
Yes my wife uses scribus but only to organise her book collection. I no longer need any of the features PageMaker offered did get into quark for a while when I worked for apple, along with freehand and illustrator but forgotten it all now.
Many years back I did programming in pascal and we bought from Borland who had the idea that software was like a book with regards to copies. I could read it because I bought it, if I gave it to you to read I could no longer read it as you had the book. But I could read it to all my students in my class as I was reading out loud to the class. Novel idea worked for me.
Came across this just now (via hackaday : The Other Way To Fight Software Rental | Hackaday) :
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/culturehustle/abode-a-suite-of-world-class-design-and-photography-tools
No Linux version unfortunately… So even if you go this way - run it on Windows, Windows is moving into the “at the mercy of landlord” space too!
I hope MacOS never goes this way…
I’ve just been using Gimp, I scanned an image from my old scrap/sketch book (i.e. hard copy pencil on kent paper) from circa 1984, into Autodesk Sketchbook (incidentally - this started out as an Irix and Windows application developed internally at SGI when they owned the ancestor of Maya) - then exported it from there to my NAS, then opened in Gimp on my Linux desktop…
Note : Autodesk Sketchbook is essentially FREE these days - and - amazingly works 100% no glitches on Wine on Linux… (note : I was a tad pissed off when they made it free, as I bought it for BOTH iOS and Android a few years earlier) - proof from my Pop!_OS 22.04 desktop :
Using “scribus” ? I’m curious… I thought it was just a desktop publishing application…
Sorry error on my part I did mean calibra for her books not scribus
Paul, I agree 100% with Linux, free to all to use. None of this Microsoft monitoring every word I type no charge for either Open Office or Libre Office. Both will run all the things that Microsoft Office do and free.! Why people pay through the nose to “RENT” Microsoft stuff is beyond comprehension. There are a couple of “FREE” things needed on Microsoft, but they are too cowardly to tell you upfront that it is a free 7 day trial until you have downloaded it and given them all your details, credit card and all.
Happy to live with Linux.
I just read Linux now has 3 % of the market been a long slow road but perhaps this will change over windows 12 and rising costs
and probably 3/4 of that is SteamDeck users… 
Steam and Valve - they enabled me to dump Windows circa 2012 when top shelf titles like Left For Dead and Serious Sam 3 got NATIVE Linux releases…
Still makes me “steam” (sic) that I can’t buy a SteamDeck for use in Australia - thanks mainly to our shortsighted politicians who used a national broadband rollout as a political football and cash cow…
18 months ago I had a cash flow surplus and could have afforded a SteamDeck - they’re now coming on the market 2nd hand in Australia, right when I find myself in a negative cash flow scenario!
I’m typing this on my Ryzen 5 Thinkpad, which I bought as a consolation (similar specs to the SteamDeck) to myself…
SteamPlay is awesome - I played the WHOLE Wolfenstein “Old Blood” using emulation (SteamPlay is Proton which is basically Wine on steroids) - but I want native (Borderlands 2 was the best top shelf title with a native Linux release IMHO) versions - SteamPlay makes developers lazy (not the programmers - the f–king marketing / beancounters).
How ironic - I just tried to fire up steam on this Thinkpad with Ubuntu 23.04 because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the Wolfenstein title - and it just about crashed my session (I managed to fire up another TTY with ctrl+alt+f4) but I manages to kill Teams and resurrect my session… Try that on Windows!
I think that’s the desktop part only. So the correct saying would be “3% of the desktop market” - I think…
Linux runs on more than 90% of the computers if we count all computers (something having a CPU and RAM + ROM).
All Soho routers run on Linux, 90+% of the servers on the Internet run on Linux, almost all supercomputers run Linux, and the very small computers, SBC’s mostly run Linux, Android based smartphones run on Linux kernel too, so that 3% wrongly suggest Linux is almost nowhere, but the truth is, Linux is there everywhere.
with barely 2 hours of battery life (Dell are better than Lenovo IMHO - but their AMD offerings are thin on the ground) - it’s barely a consolation… Never pushed either of my MacBook Pro M1’s to the limit - but I reckon I’d get 12 hours at least on full power, out of each of them (the work one has more RAM but it’s hamstrung by corporate bollocks)… Love to see Intel/AMD finally challenged… Thank f–k one player in the RISC space survived the war on RISC (i.e. ARM)…
But now RISC-V is in the picture again… Intel must be shiting themselves, now that Moore’s Law has reached a ceiling…
No - I trust the “gaming on Linux” website - and they attribute that remarkable statistic purely to SteamDeck adoption - if you want numbers I can dig them up tomorow 
Yes desktop market
I always do the sell on Linux claiming over 90% and when I say government, tax, police then go on to android phones and cars… Usually works
The confusion in France is separating Google into chrome. Search engine, and android the French use one word for all generally then if I put chromium or Firefox on they insist they have want Google but really they want that home page to search. Very few users of edge and yahoo as home page.
As long as I’m able to use my Linux distribution of choice, Microsoft can do whatever they want with their OS.
Besides: I don’t see MS getting away with OS as a service. There are simply too many people who pay a premium simply to be online. Most people worldwide actually don’t have access to broadband, let alone a stable internet connection. Could you imagine what would happen if all those people simply could not use their computer with a MS OS? Yeah, they’d quickly migrate to something else. Do you think MS wants that?
I can only recommend using a Linux distribution (I use Ubuntu 22.04, Mint is probably easier if you come from Windows). I keep Windows with double-boot for a couple of things. I use LibreOffice (collaboration with people using Microsoft Office does not raises any problem. Plus I use Thunderbird, Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus, which all do a great job. I had to use Adobe Illustrator some time ago to edit a bunch of big documents, and paid a monthly fee of 30 USD a couple of times. Many things are actually simpler with my Linux system and these software than using Windows and MS Office…