In my opinion, for end user computing, the era of the operating system is over. It's now an unimportant technical detail.
As I said within other correlations, one must not see such things by its technical points, only.
By the pure theoretical technical user's point of view, this was very desirable, makes perfect sense.
Nobody needs to care about having data saved securely. Neither need for learning how or doing backups. Not even the need for the most rudimentary computer knowledge, like saving, copying, renaming files, installing/deinstalling software etc. No need to be considered about hardware failures. No need to care for any hardware anyway (enough memory, storage space, CPU/GPU power; no different storage mediums are needed anymore, etc. etc.) No need to think of and learn anything about computers at all, just the usage of the UI of the application software, only.
Short: Just use the computer what's it actually all for, and forget about all the rest.
Plus you could safe a lot of hardware. This way you don't need to buy the most recent top state of technology machine for each user every two..three years, which would save
a lot of resources, and money. It could be done easily, and since it's very desirable it's sold that way, but is not really done, because then the hardware manufacturers had losses. But this leads too far away from my point I'm trying to make here.
Btw I love this irony: All those old Unix machines until the 1980s have been a centralized computer with terminals attached to it. After all offices in all companies have been stuffed since the 1990s with complete fully equipped computers just to connect to the accounting software on the central server, we finally coming back to that concept of terminals. Embedded into the background noise of "greybeards telling war stories from the stone ages, while they shall contemporize to the modern world."
All this is based on and leading to even more centralization, while everybody with some natural scientific based education, every engineer who's even remotely worth his title knows, distributed system are more solid, more healthy, more safe against disturbances, because they are more flexible, independent, adaptable. They do not all fail completely when the center fails.
Everything is always very nice as long as the shit works. But everybody not lost contact to reality knows: No real existing system always runs 100% flawless. Every engineer knows, one does not plan for its flawless work. One must plan for exceptions, problems, breakdowns, disturbances, changes, adaptions, maintenence, accidents... to make the shit work as flawless as possible.
Already the practical technical issues can cause severe issues: The bandwidth of internet ain't infinite. If internet connections fails, nothing goes at all anymore. For example I am in an area where constantly new buildings are constructed, and old ones are teared down. Everytime a house is added to the glass fiber net, the local net's capacity needs to be extended, or an excavator hits a line, leaving apart a power line, we have no internet connection for a couple of hours or even days - which of course you don't know in advance. Sudden Strike: Without a warning all the shit just stops working. Such happen every couple of months. If you never experienced something like it, you may say, 'Every couple of months for a few hours. Oh please, come on!' Well,
nothing goes at all. And sometimes even for days. And everybody ever did any payed work knows, there are time schedules must be met, most of the times "tomorrow", sometimes even deadlines. And the common working day of the common employee ain't intended to have a couple of hours free time.
There is no need to remind here, what a failure of the central server means.
Which brings us to two of the core concepts in systems analysis:
The pros and cons of centrality vs. distribution.
And the possibility of planning, the predictability decreases when the complexness increases.
Centralisation doesn't neccasserily mean a decrease of complexness. It only means a transformation and relocation of the according modules a system consists of. Complexness does not primarily come from centralized or distributed. It mostly comes from the tasks a system needs to do. The inceased complexness a distributed system brings is not decreased just by centralising. The parts from which the complexness of a distributed systems comes are not all elimated by centralisation. Instead you get new parts, adding new, other, unkown complexness. Sometimes the complexness of a system is even increased by centralisation.
At the same time centralisation feels pretty like a system becomes less complex that way. This is a trap. Because of all the modules, their interaction and collaboration are summarized into fewer pieces of hardware, so we see fewer things. As a reflex our brains tell us, 'Fewer things we see equals less complexness.' That's simply not true. Especially not, if most of the modules a system consists of are software. Software running in the background without showing an UI, so invisible and unkown to the common computer user.
But as I said, don't look at the technical points, only.
There are also the social, business, political and other points need to be respected.
The lack of computer knowledge creates dependency.
Centralisation creates more control, surveillance, power.
And that's why it's tried again and over again. Not to make the world a better place, but to milk the cattle even more.
And that's exactly why we need to preserve OS like BSD or Linux, to offer, preserve and guarantee alternatives, when this centralisation finally fails. And it will. It always does.
It's pure nature: When things are overdone they break.
And that's exactly the problem with capitalism: joint-stock companies
MUST always increase their wins constantly. Otherwise their indexes rushing down the toilet. But when you reached the limits of growth - we're all living in a limited system, no matter what scifi BS some YT crap makes some dream of - the methods of how to grow even more and fighting the rising numbers of knock-backs, which are immanent to the situation trying to overdo the limits, finally become absurd.
And that's exactly what were seeing right now. Not only with MS, who are already milking their cattle that hard, the cows start complaining.
Wireless was important enough to do this.