Being able to run video games or other hardware intensive process would either require pricey hardware or they’d be streamed from a cloud service (which comes with a whole other bundle of issues to consider) as that computational power has to come from something physical somewhere. Offloading your OS to the cloud wouldn’t affect that. PCs can already be accessed by phone if you have the right set up (dedicated IP hosting and a VPN) As for saving data in case of emergencies, we already have cloud based storage solutions that wouldn’t be impacted by cloud based OS.
There is 0 reason to use a cloud based OS other than making sure people are tied to your service for the life of their computer. This feels like a solution to a problem no one has.
I believe the poster above you was referring to full cloud-hosted Virtual Desktops, not just cloud-hosted OS. The former would make a lot more sense and would indeed allow for need-based scaling of resources without any expensive local hardware. I think this is the future of the common man’s computing experience - a nice monitor that also functions as a thin client to access web-hosted virtual desktops.
Yup, that was what I understood it to be, I’ll admit to just skimming the article, but it seemed rather directly that?
Windows 365 is a service that streams a full version of Windows to devices. So far, it’s been limited to just commercial customers, but Microsoft has been deeply integrating it into Windows 11 already. A future update will include Windows 365 Boot, which will enable Windows 11 devices to log directly in to a Cloud PC instance at boot instead of the local version of Windows. Windows 365 Switch is also built into Windows 11 to integrate Cloud PCs into the Task View (virtual desktops) feature.