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POST Desktop Era — Are we there?

Back in 90s when I worked at IBM, I used to use dumb terminals connected to Unix servers that had some amazing specifications. Then we went into the direction of having powerful desktop computers and powerful laptops.
With the introduction of Chromebooks (with ChromeOS), we are back to those dumb terminal days but still at the infancy phase. With Chromebooks, you can be almost 100% productive if you are not in IT industry, but when it comes to IT professionals, we are slowly getting there.
More and more tools are becoming available online through web browsers. One of those tools is Cloud 9 IDE that I have used for software development. I can do Linux commands/scripts, Node.js, Javascript, HTML5, and Python programming all through my browser on my Chromebook. Yes, I have my IDEs for my Windows and Macbook machines, but there is something fun about developing in a cloud IDE. Maybe it is just the nerd side of me.
The message in the above image is what I saw one day when my Cloud 9 IDE was loading; it’s awesome.
You can even set up an Amazon WorkSpaces service in AWS and install the Chromebook client app for Amazon WorkSpaces and your Chromebook turns into a proxy for a Windows 10 machine in the cloud. With the elegance of the client app, it makes you believe that your Chromebook is a Windows 10 machine.
So are we there yet? If you are an early adapter, then we are there. I think we are still a few years away from web browser tools being as good as desktop tools, but some VDI solutions are already a great substitute for your full OS laptops. There are exciting times ahead of us.
Thank you for reading this article and Happy Cloud Computing :)
Almir Mustafic
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