Second Life is the only reason I need a computer

That may be a slight exaggeration. :)

But my fancy Alienware laptop, which has had various power problems for some time, has been ignoring its power cord for a few days now, either to operate or to charge its battery, and the local convincing-sounding person that I found on Craigslist to fix it says it’ll probably be next weekend.

And the only thing I find myself missing (aside from a few media files trapped on its hard drive because they were too big to keep conveniently in the cloud), is Second Life.

For work and general keyboard-typing, I have this worked-owned Chromebook Pixel, which arguably counts as a netbook rather than a laptop computer. To do work-related stuff I use that to talk to a computer under my desk at work (it’s running a Linux variant, and I don’t even know what brand of hardware it is), and use that to talk to hundreds of other computers out in the cloud somewhere, but those aren’t really mine.

For music and some games and things I have an iPad. But even that I haven’t been using all that much lately, because I finally got my first smartphone, and it takes care of a surprisingly large fraction (near 100%) of the things that I can’t conveniently do on the Pixel.

Which fits in with this whole bizarre thing about how PC sales are down by more than 10%, due almost certainly to how everyone else is also buying netbooks and tablets and phones and things instead.

This suggests that things like Second Life (and for that matter WoW and so on) do need to figure out how to get onto netbooks / tablets / phones, if they want to be relevant to anyone but hardcore gamers with needs for more muscular PCs.

One way to do this is with server-side rendering, but not much seems to be happening with that. (Whatever happened to that server-side version of the SL viewer? Is that still a thing?)

Another way would be to have some lower-resolution world with a lightweight client that could fit onto an iPad, say; maybe something like a more Linden-flavored Minecraft with cute little — ohhhhh, I get it.

And a third way would be to have netbook / tablet / phone viewers that did actual client-side rendering of the usual SL world, and let you interact with it. Hm, anyone tried out Lumiya lately?

Maybe someday I will say “the only thing I need a computer for is taking high-res pictures in SL”… :)