The author seems to care mostly about UEFI and secure boot, but there are other advantages to desktop (not to mention the likely partially permanent shift to remote work post-covid). Personally, I run a bit of a hybrid setup.
My new Dell XPS 13 came with Ubuntu pre-installed (which I replaced with Void Linux) and for the most part allows for a lot of tweaking. When I'm at home, I connect to my eGPU unit with one cable, allowing me to use my secondary monitor, a proper mouse, and external hard drives (although internal is already 1TB SSD). The eGPU unit is a Razer Core V2 with a GTX 1060, which is good enough for VR games, which play well on Linux these days surprisingly. Then a lot of my stuff is self-hosted in the cloud anyway, like a media server, backups, servers for development, even an IRC bouncer. I also run my own smart home software on a raspberry pi.
So while at the moment this might not be typical for an average consumer, the trend towards edge computing will really make the laptop into an "internet appliance" as the author says, and the browser an OS. Hell, with 5G, cloud gaming for VR may even be viable, and then we're back to the equivalent of terminals and mainframes.
The only real issue then is the ownership of these services — I don't agree with the author that everything will become a SaaS and no more open hardware will exist. It will always exist as long as there's a demand for it, you just have to accept that it'll be more expensive and less consumer-friendly. E.g. I have to accept that I can't hotplug my eGPU on Linux like you can on Windows, and I need to pay for my servers. Spotify and Netflix will always be cheaper than any legal means of acquiring media otherwise specifically because of their size.
My new Dell XPS 13 came with Ubuntu pre-installed (which I replaced with Void Linux) and for the most part allows for a lot of tweaking. When I'm at home, I connect to my eGPU unit with one cable, allowing me to use my secondary monitor, a proper mouse, and external hard drives (although internal is already 1TB SSD). The eGPU unit is a Razer Core V2 with a GTX 1060, which is good enough for VR games, which play well on Linux these days surprisingly. Then a lot of my stuff is self-hosted in the cloud anyway, like a media server, backups, servers for development, even an IRC bouncer. I also run my own smart home software on a raspberry pi.
So while at the moment this might not be typical for an average consumer, the trend towards edge computing will really make the laptop into an "internet appliance" as the author says, and the browser an OS. Hell, with 5G, cloud gaming for VR may even be viable, and then we're back to the equivalent of terminals and mainframes.
The only real issue then is the ownership of these services — I don't agree with the author that everything will become a SaaS and no more open hardware will exist. It will always exist as long as there's a demand for it, you just have to accept that it'll be more expensive and less consumer-friendly. E.g. I have to accept that I can't hotplug my eGPU on Linux like you can on Windows, and I need to pay for my servers. Spotify and Netflix will always be cheaper than any legal means of acquiring media otherwise specifically because of their size.