the rise of VMs removed one of the more social aspects of computing: having to play internal politics with everyone else sharing the same remote server, through the local chat and message systems and also pranks and traps
and it's, like...
we miss it. it was nice. (we didn't really do the pranks or traps thing personally, but we were on a few shared servers in the day)
but also, a lot of the things we used to need a remote Unix machine for we can now accomplish fine with Linux on our laptop or a smolputer
much like email replaced the secretary, now requiring all employees to have advanced writing skills or struggle in ways that make the whole process regress to the mean, modern linux affordances have made it such that most 5 year linux 'system administrators' barely know how to deal with systems that aren't just them
