On the fact that it is running Windows
- There is a real element of “proprietary software - shabbos goy” as discussed on Free as in Freedom.
- Though probably better containment of Windows telemetry from the rest of your computing; if your alternative is building a gaming PC with windows 10.
On Carbon Footprint
- There is no apparent consensus on my corner of the Fediverse on if any energy efficiencies gained by centralizing GPUs and rapidly spinning them down when not in use outweighs the additional energies needed in both network transmission of the data and running the client.
- The carbon foorprint of network transmission of the data is a real concern especially at scale.
- Best case scenario your moving your carbon consumption around, worst case is that is that your doing worse. The only way this could be better is if the data center was striving to offset their carbon; and Shadow does not seem to be advertising this fact. Which heavily suggests they are not doing it.
On Price
- It is pricey. But probably less so if the alternate is to build a gaming PC. After looking into it I remain tempted to try it for a a limited time and see what I think of it.
Other Notes
- Independent french company not associated with any of the usual megacorps from what I can tell.
- Extremely laisez fair in how you manage your cloud machine. It’s strangely a bit like a Windows VPS thats never supposed to be a server.
- Few to no other GNU/Linux friendly services exist.
- Shadow has no software marketplace. Their is no expectation to purchase games from Shadow, their simply renting customers gaming PCs for their existing software libraries.
Conclusion:
- Current talkgroup interest in this is low. And this is most of the research I was interested in. So this alone might complete the quest.