Ask Paul: July 30 (Premium)

Happy Friday! If you’re interested in kicking off the weekend a bit early, here’s a notably long episode of Ask Paul to pass the time.

Windows in the cloud

crunchyfrog asks:

My main company laptop has been acting up so I resorted to using a personal device to get by and I tried something that I knew about and never bothered to test before. I am running Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint with the cloud versions using my corporate login on Microsoft Edge, and you know what? It runs great! I don’t even know why I’d bother with the hassle of local installs again, assuming I have connectivity, which I do. I have been aware of these being available in the cloud for some time but assumed it would be pared back in some serious way and the UX might be clunky. I am certain that some obscure features might not be there and some menus are different but beyond that it runs smooth and all of my stuff is there. I believe that this is the direction Microsoft ultimately wants us all to go in and would like to know your feedback and if you have been doing this to any extent or run this regularly at all.

I think we’re still in a place in time where the ability to run Windows—or, even better, specific Windows apps—from the cloud, be it Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, or whatever third-party solution, is one of several options. And that, from Microsoft’s perspective, the goal here is really just to keep people and businesses in its ecosystem, which is really Microsoft 365, and not just Windows. So this is one way to accomplish that, and it’s a good one because it will benefit companies that want to keep their data safe and individuals, like you, who are concerned about the separation of home and work.

Even in the often-insipid marketing materials that Microsoft has created for testing Windows 11 in the Insider Program, there is a telling comment by a Microsoft product manager in an article about the new Windows 11 look and feel that skirts around this issue. “The purpose of an operating system is not to exist by itself, it’s to be that stage for the things you want to get done, says product manager Tom Alphin. Right. Put more simply, the point of Windows isn’t Windows itself, it’s the apps and services you rely on every day. And if you can make those apps and services more broadly available, all the better. For everyone involved.

I happen to prefer Windows to macOS or whatever else, and I love that that’s even more true with Windows 11. But not everyone has the same Windows fixation I do, and they want to get work done no matter which device they prefer. But even in my experience, I can sign in to individual apps with my work account (which I do for Teams) and choose to let that organization manage only that app and not the entire PC. I do this sometimes as well with my Microsoft 365 commercial account, where I can choose between signing into Windows with that account, or just to the Office apps, including OneDrive. (I usually do neither, since this is a kind of tertiary account for testing, but whatever.)

Overall, I see Windows 365 and similar solutions as a more modern way to bridge the home/work gap, and it’s simpler (and probably less expensive) for organizations that remotely managing a mix of corporate and home PCs that have work apps and data on them. But it will be interesting to see how this evolves. In the future, will many of us transition to our own Windows PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, or mobile devices of whatever kind and simply run legacy/corporate apps remotely? And what impact will that have on Windows/PC sales?

Detractors will correctly point out that these solutions require bandwidth that a lot of people don’t have. An Inspire session about Windows 365 suggests that a 20/20 Mbps would do the trick, and even in a semi-remote area like where I live, it’s possible to get a 940/90 Mbps connection for $57 per month. (Well, not for me, but whatever. My issues with RCN remain my issues.) Over time, this barrier will disappear for most. And the mix of where and how we use Windows apps will shift with it.

I’m very interested in testing Windows 365, and I don’t even really need it at this point.

Linux design

bschnatt asks:

I think I already know the answer to this, but have you ever given any thought to doing UI design for a new (or existing) Linux distro? One of the great things about Linux is that there’s nothing you’re not allowed to try out on your own. (You can even take a stab at kernel changes if you can impress Torvalds…) Don’t like a distro? Create your own! Don’t like Linux Mint’s desktop manager selection? Write your own! It would be challenging, and would let you exercise your creative juices 😉 Imagine your own Linux distro: Thurrott’s Bane… 😉

As some may recall, I’ve been researching Linux distributions for an article series for a while now—too long, really, but I keep getting distracted—and part of the challenge is finding one that meets my design sensibilities. I am very much interested in something minimalist, from a design perspective. But I’m not sure I have any particular design skills that I could bring to bear to design my own UI. I think I’ll just know I like it when I see it.

Right now, the two I like the most from a look-and-feel perspective are Elementary OS (which is more than a bit Mac-like) and Pop OS!.

Unrelated to your question, but both are an interesting reminder that maybe a better approach for the Windows 11 UI is to move all the Quick Settings/Notifications/Calendar stuff off of the taskbar, which would make that thing look cleaner, and put it in a top-mounted menu bar as we see in macOS and, often, in Linux. I know this idea will get pushback in certain quarters, but centering the taskbar is just one step towards this design. Microsoft should go all the way.

Florida and the future

bschnatt also asks:

Has this collapsing condo disaster in Florida made you think differently about Florida and the prospect of living there? I had actually given some serious thought to buying a condo overlooking the ocean down there, but now I’m sour on the idea. The management by those condo owners is apparently quite bad. Have you decided where you’re going to move yet. (Sorry, we all sound like a broken record, I guess…)

Well. Florida isn’t necessarily high on my list per se, it’s an option for the same reasons it’s an option for retired people: It has a low cost of living. That’s always part of our calculation for whatever is next—we moved to Pennsylvania in part to lower our cost of living—and it’s one of the top criteria. But it’s not the only factor, and there are things about Florida—the humidity, the heat in the summer, the lifestyle, the politics, etc.—that we don’t like at all. Where Florida could make sense for us is if we decide we’re going to split time between two places and we want one permanent base, and then want that base to be in the United States and be as inexpensive as possible.

The other factor is whether that home, permanent or not, is a standalone house or a townhome or condo. The issue with the former is security: If we’re splitting our time, then we’re not there a lot of the time, and the house will be sitting unoccupied with our valuables inside. But the issues with the latter two options can be even more problematic: Noise from neighbors, HOA fees (which may just go up every year), and, yes, problems like those that caused the Miami collapse, where some owners want to pay for improvements but many do not, and they’re just riding out their lives spending as little as possible as they go. And probably many others.

For me/us to live in a condo/townhouse, it would almost have to be an end unit, and the building would have to consist of separate units side-by-side, and not be an apartment building-style condo like that one that collapsed. That’s not because of the collapse, I just don’t want people above and below me. But the collapse certainly provides another reason.

We still don’t know where we’ll end up.

That said, we’re visiting Mexico again starting next Thursday, this time for two weeks, and we’ll spend the first week visiting San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, and Querétaro, which are all north and west of Mexico City. And then our kids are flying in the following Thursday, and we’ll visit the city with them. Mexico certainly has a (very) low cost of living, and that might be an interesting option for one of those two places, and it has a huge variety of climates and lots of expat communities. Is it an interesting option as a base, permanent or otherwise? It’s way too early to say that: We’ve only been there once, effectively. (We did visit Mexico previously, but only on the edges as tourists.) I guess you never know.

To be clear, we evaluate every place we visit as a potential residence or a spot for a long-term stay. Most places don’t make the cut for whatever reason, and that’s usually obvious pretty quickly. For example, I would move to Paris if I was rich, but I’m not. And on our work trips to Florida, I always think about it, but the humidity (at least where we’ve been, like Orlando and Miami) kills that idea. Mexico? So far so good. But one trip does not a decision make.

As for the U.S. side of things, we’re looking all over. All of New England is of interest because of the proximity to family and friends, but we would never be there in the winter. And much of the south. I’m very interested in Tennessee, Kentucky, North and South Caroline, and George, in particular. I would even look at Puerto Rico, another place we’ve only visited once. (Hurricanes and poverty are the big issues there.) We love Colorado and have friends there. I used to live in Albuquerque and still miss it, but my wife isn’t much of a fan.

Given all that, we’re seriously considering just being mobile for some period of time while we’re young enough to do it. I researched mobile homes and trailers for a long time during the pandemic, but that idea was eventually crossed off the list because of the cost and complexity. (My wife and I have talked about seeing a baseball game in every MLB stadium, for example.) But we could also just do long-term (one to three month) Airbnb-type rentals for a while, and move from place to place. Maybe sample some of the places on that list. And there are other places I’d like to spend more time in, like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, but maybe not with an eye on moving there permanently.

As I said, we still don’t know. 🙂 Job one right now is the big decluttering push, which is moving along. And we have so many other things to think/worry about, including the kids and how whatever we do will impact them, and the dog and cats, which probably won’t be able to join us on whatever comes next. And our friends, too, many of whom are in the Boston area, which is today an easy-ish drive so we can all visit each other. Of course, these are the types of things that drive indecision and prevent people from making the life changes they might otherwise make. That’s a struggle, for sure, but we’re going to figure it out.

Framework laptop

Daishi asks:

Just wondering if you have looked at the Framework Laptop at all and if you have any plans to get one for review?

Yeah, I’ve been paying close attention to this, and am a fan of what they’re trying to do. It helps that the resulting laptop looks mostly solid, too.

With regards to reviewing one, I’d like to. I’ve written sporadically, here and there, about my desire to get caught up on my laptop reviews, and almost wrote something about that topic, so maybe this is as good a place as any to just discuss that a bit. (My post Throwback: My First Laptop Review (Premium) yesterday came up because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.)

I know this sounds like a good problem to have, but it’s like anything else in life and falls into that “grass is always greener” category. Meaning that getting laptops for free to review sounds great, and it’s not necessarily terrible, but there are multiple levels of responsibility that accompany this process. And I take them seriously. The two most obvious are that the laptops are not my property and have to eventually be returned and that I need to write something meaningful about these products because I know people might actually take my advice seriously and spend a lot of money. And I want to make sure that what I write isn’t based solely on a few days of experience, as is very much the case almost everywhere else. (There are exceptions, of course.)

Anyway, the former issue is partially a procrastination problem on my part, and over the years, I have always finished with a laptop, written the review, thrown it in a corner somewhere, and forgotten about it. Over time, these laptops pile up. And they sometimes become separated from their power supplies and other peripherals. And the boxes are down in the cellar. And it’s a huge mess.

Sometimes I will just get a bunch of them together, collect all the stuff that goes with them, box them up, and return them en masse. Sometimes, I need a subtle prodding from a PC maker, as these companies will routinely reach out to reviewers and passive-aggressively ask if we need shipping labels or whatever as a reminder that the PCs are past due. But either way, they eventually go back. My policy here is very simple: I don’t own these PCs, and while it’s embarrassing that their owners sometimes have to remind me and others to send them back, that’s their right, and once they do, they go back immediately.

So that had to change. And what I’ve done this year is changed to a system in which I’m tracking the dates in which I receive PCs, write the first impressions post, and then publish the final review. Thanks to two factors—my desire to write a useful/thorough review and thus spend real time with each device, and my general disorganization—this process has, to date, taken too long. Heading into July, I was averaging about two months between a PC’s arrival and the review. (And much longer on those recent premium Chromebooks.)

Thanks to my tracking of this information, I’ve started cutting down on the time to review and, after shipping out about 15 PCs to Dell, Lenovo, and others over a one-week period, I’ve started shipping PCs back immediately after I publish the review. So there won’t be a backlog anymore where I have PCs, their power supplies and peripherals, and their boxes, all scattered around my house. My goal is to get the time to review down to 3 weeks if possible. Maybe even two weeks.

Now, instead of unboxing a PC and putting (hiding) the box in my cellar, I stack the boxes for review PCs in the corner of my office, with the newest box on the bottom. That way, when I finish a review, I can pull out the box, reset the PC, box it all up, and ship it back immediately. I’ve only been doing this for the past month, but I think it will work. The FedEx guys actually commented about it.

Complicating matters, I keep getting new PCs in. And I feel like the rate is accelerating, so I’ve been saying no to some review units. But consider this: It’s the end of July, and during this one month, I received six review PCs. Six! (They are the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8, ASUS ExpertBook, Acer TravelMate P6, Samsung Galaxy Book Pro, HP Pavilion Aero, and another PC I’ll write a first impressions post for later today. It’s going to be a long month of writing.

So. To your question. Will I review the Foundation PC? I would like to. But I’m going to wait until we get back from our trip, and back from a short trip immediately afterward to bring our daughter back to school. And then I’ll reach out to them and see if I can get on the list. Based on history, it’s possible/likely I’ll have had other review PC offers come in between now and then, too, of course. So we’ll see.

Short term, I’m going to see whether I can finish the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8 review before the trip next week, and if so, I’ll bring the ASUS ExpertBook to Mexico and review that during the trip. If not, I will do that for the ZBook. I’m also bringing the HP Elite Dragonfly Max, which I’ve not yet returned because of its portability and its 5G capabilities (I’ll be adding a Google Fi data SIM for the trip), and because I’ve installed Windows 11 on it and need a Windows 11-based PC for obvious reasons.

No rest for the wicked.

Arcade games

jimchamplin asks:

I attended the Austin, TX Retro Games Fest this pat weekend and came home with an Atari 800.

Nice! Jay Miner would be proud.

Got Centipede, Pole Position, Pac Man (inoperative), Space Raders, Atari Logo, and of course the required BASIC cart. This isn’t my first 80s home computer (or 8-bit or micro, whatever you prefer to call them 🙂 ) but it makes me wonder, since this is an Atari system … What were your favorite arcade games back in “The Day”?

Ah boy.

I loved all the obvious early arcade games, from Space Invaders (which people might forget was black and white), Asteroids (also black and white, of course), and Missile Command, to Battlezone (awesome vector graphics) and Tempest (color vector graphics). I was a huge fan of Defender, Galaxian, Galaga, Centipede, and Millipede. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (which I thought was better). Donkey Kong. Q-Bert was a big favorite for a while. Zaxxon and Xevious too. Probably many others that I can’t even think of right now.

I was particularly good at Centipede and Galaga. I used to set the record on Centipede in a bar that was on the way to the mall where there was an arcade, but they would pull the plug every night, so it was fresh every time I showed up. (We later frequented that place as adults, when it turned into a good restaurant, now a small chain, called Halfway Cafe. No more arcade games, though.)

Home video game consoles and early personal computers kind of killed the arcades, I guess. I feel like my Amiga 500 was probably as good as anything in the arcades by the late 1980s, if not better.

Windows 11 as a service

madthinus asks:

Windows 11: The real Windows as a service? I am being a bit provocative, but to me, this is what the aim is. Feature updates that is Windows upgrades that can break things in the process is terrible. The new model in Windows 11: Base build in place, CU’s update, change and fix monthly. Is far more feasible? Is this not the very definition of a service model?

Yeah, I think that’s fair. And while I was not a fan of Windows as a Service (WaaS) at all, for obvious reasons, I do feel like the changes they made late in the game, and the evolution of those changes in the servicing model for Windows 11, is at least a major improvement. Two of the last three Windows 10 feature updates were just monthly cumulative updates with no major functional changes, and the third was even less than that.

Delivering two real feature updates (e.g. two version upgrades) each year never made sense, and delivering even one per year for a mature product like Windows is still arguably problematic. But Windows 11 sort of benefits from being new. This new system of delivering new features potentially each month sounds horrible, but there will be a lot of feedback-based changes that should happen more quickly than next year. And at least the servicing system works better than before.

Chromebooks

erich82 asks:

Do you have any plans to continue the Living With Chrombebook series?

Yes, but it’s unclear what form that will take. Similar to the Linux stuff I’m looking into, I feel like there is a broader series related to web apps and services that Chromebooks, especially, should be part of. I touched on this a bit in my post A Tale of Two Chromebooks last week, where I discussed some of the workflow issues that are particular to me and how they impact my ability to even use a Chromebook. But there’s a lot more to it, and I’m still sorting that out. Even something like the Outlook add-on for Edge, which Microsoft announced alongside Edge 92, plays a role in this because here is this new way to access this information, all based around the browser. I also most started going down this path when Microsoft released something called the Edge Office Viewer Preview back in May—I actually wrote quite a bit at the time—but that tool ended up not being exactly what I thought it was, and I kind of put the brakes on.

I’m still working through this, but I think the shift to web apps and services is big and that this will replace all the native app platforms we now deal with. But I also feel like it’s a lengthy transition, and that there will be holdouts and blockers everywhere, and that navigating this path is worth discussing and debating. I just need to find the right way to present it.