Microsoft Needs Windows Lite
philipbohun.com
philipbohun.com
* Costs them money to make
* Costs them money to maintain
* Will only be used by a TINY subset of ultra-enthusiasts (no, neither HN or Reddit are majorities)
* Every user on it is less telemetry and less advertisement
The reality is that most users don't care, and will just use whatever seems to work fine. Finding out that 'oh yeah, feature/software X does not work on Windows Lite" will inevitably mean that almost everyone stays on mainline.
I don't get why people bother making these wish fulfillment posts regarding Windows. It is what it is, either get used to it or use something else. MS hasn't been listening and they aren't going to start. Your wallet and mine don't make even the tiniest dent in their bottom line.
The majority has no other option. Linux is too much trouble to learn and Mac requires a new device. What else are you supposed to do?
I miss how tight the older versions were. They were technical and got the job done -- the newer designs seem like they're trying too hard to be round and big and friendly. Everything is so spaced out, so much is wasted, information density is pretty much completely gone. It's so sad.
My Intel MBP is still on 10.14.6 because even Catalina was too much for me (removing 32-bit support is kind of a full-reinstall sort of move). But Big Sur looked kinda awful the moment I saw it and Tahoe feels like the Mac is completely losing its identity and principles.
I'm on ASi now and running the latest macOS 27 beta. I don't regret it but I just feel sad, you know?
> What else are you supposed to do?
Customize. You can strip out entire features, often called “debloat” but it’s hyper specific. It couldn’t be a general purpose pc after, and a debloated gaming config might lack the support to run other kinds of apps, or vice versa.
They even have a lightly modified version called LTSC although it retains so much feature surface area so as to remain “Windows” it’s not like the article’s idea, but it exists.
Or that they all even run Windows in the first place.
I have one friend who just loves listening to AI readings of AI-generated drama farming content purporting to be real content from Reddit. It's bizarre.
I also found at least one subreddit for a product which specifically banned posts with the word "scam" in them when I went to make a post about the product being a scam. If that doesn't tell you how much of a scam it actually is, I don't know what does.
Even before the rise of LLMs, everyone knew Reddit was astroturfed to hell and back.
Reddit mods are largely paid shills. Reddit users are zombies. It's worthless to consider the site as a good source of information or sentiment anymore.
- tolerance is too high
- Every sysadmin is quietly annoyed but knows it gives then $$$.
- Companies are never going to change anytime.
I honestly don't think windows is worth any price. Unix is the platform of builders, and nobody needs a middleman charging them to breathe air (run an os).
But both of these products would only show damage in the very long run, which also means M$ won't react to it until late.
Also the OP specifically fantasizes about unchanged compatibility.
Really there would be no reason not to use this, so it would likely have to be more expensive than the regular spyware/adware version. Thus it couldn’t get away with the name “Lite” and would end up being called “Professional”.
And then maybe we could get the dream that is Windows lite
Just stop feeding them money or stop complaining.
Yes you can't get it legally as a regular end user but MSFT also doesn't care about piracy either. They don't lose money on you (they rather keep you as a Windows user than switch to another platform).
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is supported until 2032, Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 is supported until 2034.
That's why it's not mentioned, it's not a product for "normal users", the audience described in the post.
It's asinine. They could charge $1000+ for LTSC licenses, but my data and digital sovereignty is apparently worth even more to them.
A funny estimate is possible though. MSFT 2750 G$ market cap and 550 M business users. That’s 5 k$ per user. Grossly misrepresenting everything (AI bubble, other cashflows, …) but it is a ‘directionally right’.
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-...
"Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC is designed for devices that have strict change-management policies with only security and critical bug fixes." There is no way for anyone, enterprise or otherwise, to license LTSC for conventional use on their own PC. LTSC IoT is the successor to Windows CE, strictly licensed for embedded applications like kiosks, ATMs, slot machines and the like.
When you do license LTSC for a device, you obtain the .iso the same way as all other volume-licensed versions. That's all the article at your URL is talking about.
Specifically, you can buy a single-seat Microsoft 365 E3 subscription directly from Microsoft for $432/year, which includes a license for a single user to use Windows Enterprise, including LTSC, on up to 5 PCs (along with other stuff, mainly Office).
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/e3
(click "try for free")
See here (Enterprise and IoT Enterprise LTSB/LTSC editions):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...
Technically it can break some apps if they are hard coded to only work with 22H2. Probably happens with some video games and anti cheat software ("always needs the latest update")
There is a Windows 11 LTSC version which works the same.
However I did use windows 10 ltsc for quite a few years until I hit a dll issue with an old game that turned out to be unresolvable as far as I could tell at the time. So much so I switched to pro (I have a work visual studio subscription so I have access to all versions of windows for free). I can't for the life of me remember what dll or what game it was. But I tend to play older games so probably not something many will hit the same problem.
https://en.windowsnoticias.com/Where-to-get-cheap-and-offici...
This whole thing makes sense for indie devs or build VMs but breaks down for Enterprise pretty quick, and Microsoft is much more friendly to Enterprise customers than indie devs.
"OP says Windows needs webdevs to make webpages, but then says Windows Lite internals shouldn't be tightly knit with Internet Explorer, one of the primary means of viewing webpages on windows."
However, this is not what Microsoft wants or needs. Microsoft is doing just fine by providing businesses what they need: a platform that can be tightly controlled and is easy to administer for large user counts.
Printer administration and Windows printer UX are different too, although the endless-printer-list-oh-god-its-not-even-alphabetical situation is more of an admin oversight to a clunky and low priority situation than anything. Small comfort, no doubt.
That, or your IT team sucks. The problem with Windows being so easy is that any idiot can do it, and they often do.
Microsoft's core product is minimizing operational risk, not the software itself. You can piece together your own stack using best of breed options, but you're going to pay double the price or more, and introduce a ton of friction and risk.
Some businesses (everyone outside of the SV tech echo chamber) "need" Microsoft because its risk mitigation, which is the highest technical feature a business can ask for. Backwards compatibility, EntraID is good, and the compliance/purview stack solves nearly all regulatory headaches OOTB.
OTOH yeah there's a bit of legacy entrenchment, both from Microsoft's monopolistic behavior but also because they were the only ones with an "IT In a box" solution for non-tech companies. Having a cohesive identity, security, and device management ecosystem that can scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints with a few mouse clicks takes a lot of engineering effort that not many others were doing at the time.
They didn't run Windows because they liked Windows, they ran Windows because it was required by the software they needed to run.
The local car dealership runs factory diagnostic software on Windows.
The two-way radio shop tunes and programs radios using vendor software written for Windows.
Your dentist runs their practice management software runs on Windows, and they Windows software to control other expensive equipment like X-ray machines and 3D scanners.
The fact that consumers use Windows is a nice side effect for keeping mind share and to get people familiar and preferring windows when they enter the workplace. That's it. It's an accidental userbase that exists to be exploited.
Microsoft's money comes from Azure & Office(365). If you're not spending millions on enterprise support/software assurance (or whatever they call it these days) contracts, you pretty much don't exist to them.
How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s
Or do you mean no Office support, just everything you need to run Steam?
Or maybe you mean no UI and just the admin interface so you don't need all that bloat when all you need is a server. Except for Powershell and the management interface, of course.
Actually, these days, we don't need applications, Copilot can do all that for us. Just Edge, Bing, and Copilot, the rest is bloat.
There's plenty of unnecessary crap in Windows but everyone who wants Windows Lite wants a different subset to be included in Windows Lite. Just imagine the tech support hell you'd be in when a client installs your software on a machine that doesn't have .NET or H.264 support or libraries for decoding JPEGs or a webview because their kid said they can make the PC less bloated. And you can bet that Windows' remote help support and all of the requirements for third party remote desktop are omitted from anyone's view of "minimal Windows"!
For what it's worth, various stripped-down Windows images exist online. They all use official Windows binaries with signed DLLs and everything so you could theoretically even verify that they're safe. Just don't expect your programs to work on them and be ready to reinstall when a system service inevitably corrupts.
I know you're trying to make a counter point, but nobody wants copilot. Out of everyone I've talked to in the last year, across a broad spectrum of Windows users from sys admins who make me feel like a caveman down to my parents, nobody trusts AI and nobody wants AI in their OS or apps.
An AI free Windows would be an instant hit, but it would fly in the face of everything Microsoft stands for, so for that reason, it'll never happen
But what I also came out thinking was: none of that shows. The kernel is great, sure, but all of the crap that has been built on top doesn't let it shine, and that's what people interact with. Take Windows 11 with is dog-slow file manager and the overall feeling that everything is bloated and designed to annoy you. I wish there was a simpler edition... but it ain't gonna happen.
Not quite sure about this. .NET is a superb platform, easy to write reasonably good code, huge standard library, well-maintained, many languages supporting a wide variety of paradigms (C#, VB, F#, PowerShell, C++). .NET is one of Microsoft's success stories.
That said, knowing Microsoft they WOULD release something like this but cripple it by doing something stupid like disallowing the use of virtualization technology, even as an installed package.
I disagree. .NET is fundamental to the Windows platform. It's like having a Python runtime installed by default in some Linux distros, which makes sense for that distribution's use-case.
If the argument is to try to prohibit it, then it just won't work as a platform, because too much existing software won't work on it. There's a lot of garbage I'd love to not have (all the stupid hardware config apps all the manufacturers push on you) but just having that functionality not work can't be the answer.
Similar pet peeve, and I think the solution to this is the platform setting, adopting, and enforcing conventions. Something like what has happened with notebook trackpads[1] about a decade ago, and more recently RGB peripherals[2]—no more cancerous giant Electron app to move a few sliders and set an RGB hex code.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/input-precis...
[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/xbox/gdk/docs/features/com...
That will also ship vulnerable drivers.
That's because Windows ships with an ancient .NET 4.8.1 by default. Purely a mistake on Microsoft's part not to bundle modern .NET with their product and force software packaging hell.
The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. Businesses pick them for employee computers for the same reason.
And Windows Server more or less became a moot point when the cloud took over. They don’t want you hosting your own Exchange server anymore, they want you in Office 365. And they’ll just as happily sell you Linux compute instances on Azure because lower COGS means more profit.
Ever since the MacBook Neo, that's no longer the case. And frankly... Apple has now demonstrated that an old iPhone SoC is enough to drive macOS. I think that it should be feasible for them to run macOS on iDevices as a hypervisor-style guest, yielding you the full macOS experience when plugged into an USB-C dock.
Budget Windows hardware is trash and the OS is so full of bloat that within a couple of years a budget Windows laptop will be barely functional. For a long time now arguably the only reason to go Windows is if you're a gamer or a business user with very specific software requirements.
But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.
Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.
Fair point. But they are also showing people that you can have decent Apple performance at a price point previously reserved for budget Windows laptops.
> It is easier to administer too.
Meh, that's... not as clear as it used to be. Yes, in a full on corporate world based on on-prem AD, GPO and the rest of the MS architecture that might be the case, but even there, IT already has to support Macs because marketing/PR and IT usually demand macOS. And with Windows, it has always been a huge effort to keep up with MS and patchdays randomly breaking stuff. Apple is far more stable.
As a Microsoft sysadmin with a stable of homelab machines of all types and brands (and favorites that are definitely not Microsoft), enterprise mostly buys Microsoft because of the built in endpoint and end user management stacks.
macOS makes it kind of difficult to do these things, so when companies do deploy the same control they use on Windows, the problem actually becomes worse, because every management tool now needs to rely on hacks rather than officially supported APIs.
Lazy IT departments are a blessing!
A problem Windows admins often face is that there are lots of knobs to tweak, and because they can tweak a knob in GPO, they (or their bosses) start believing that they automatically should.
The other important factor is that the share of PCs in general is a fraction of Android and iOS devices.
And that's why the MacBook Neo exists now. Apple is coming for the lower-end market.
At that point the only thing keeping people on Windows is software lock-in. Which Valve is in the process of working towards dismantling for gaming at least.
Google has gone after the low-end market through ChromeOS and has actually been very succesful at it. Sure, the $200 pieces of crap can't really do anything more than play a video and maybe type into a document at the same time, but that's better than what the Windows alternative offered for many years.
Linux and open source have made "selling operating systems" nearly as preposterous as it was back in the mainframe era when they were getting started. So it's gotten very hard to generate revenue directly from Windows. Not even Apple is in the business of selling an OS—they sell hardware, and the OS comes as part of the package. Microsoft has kept good will amongst OEMs by keeping Windows license prices for hardware manufacturers low to nonexistent—were they to actually try making money through the OEM channel by charging a more reasonable price per license, the OEMs would find a way to jump ship to Linux (perhaps ChromeOS). This has already happened during the "netbook era" until Microsoft intervened with Windows 7 Starter Edition.
The pivot for Windows has thus been to find ways for Windows to generate revenue indirectly—by funneling users into other Microsoft products and services, particularly cloud and AI in 2026. But this approach is creating the exact user-hostility problems people are complaining about. Without the ability to generate revenue directly, nor the ability to generate revenue indirectly through cloud services, Windows becomes a cost center rather than a profit center.
So no, I don't see them going the Windows Lite route at all. If they cut out the fat, they cut off Windows's revenue stream and its reason for existing in the first place.
Looking from the outside, it doesn't seem that Microsoft treats Windows as an isolated product anymore with a balance sheet of sales versus development costs. Rather, it's an advertising billboard for their other money-making products like Edge, Copilot, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and at some point Candy Crush of all things(?). In fact this isn't isolated to just Windows or Microsoft either. SwiftKey pushes you to use OneDrive, Google (search engine) famously pushed Google products and there were antitrust discussions about that. Advertising was just some annoying thing that was necessary to power free web services but now it's infiltrated the very core of our day-to-day technology. Until we can get proper antitrust enforcement, we'll only see technological stagnation get worse as more products become boring billboard monopolies with little incentives to get better.
1. NT is a hybrid kernel. Windows runs many drivers in userspace, if not in a limited kernel environment. This includes network drivers and GPU drivers. It can recover from crashes more gracefully than Linux and BSD kernels. Linux has similar drivers for specific use cases like FUSE, however, they are not as performant as NT.
2. NT has always been designed to drive a GUI-driven OS. So it has better default tunings than a vanilla Linux kernel to operate and stay reactive under memory pressure. When your system is under pressure you'd lose mouse movement on Linux, on NT this is rare. It is not impossible to do this under Linux, however, not many companies (except maybe Android manufacturers and Google/ChromeOS) actually invest in this.
3. NT provides a mostly stable API and ABI for drivers. It is not as strong as Win32 guarantees, however it retained mostly the same driver infrastructure since Vista. Many Win7 or Win8 drivers continue to work under Win11.
4. Bundled drivers for consumer systems in NT are often better quality. This could be the side effect of stable ABI. Unlike Linux, significant refactors changing big parts of the driver APIs are rare. I think this reflects in the quality of drivers like USB Host drivers. I deal with embedded Linux systems (x86, RPi), there is always some "rmmod and modprobe to fix USB" script somewhere in a deployed Linux embedded system. I have never seen anything similar in Windows Kiosk setups (TBH I have seen a lot of reinit of COM drivers but it is often manufacturer's faulty implementation).
5. There is simply more money invested to make consumer drivers work on NT. Linux is often an afterthought for many consumer device manufacturers. There is still not enough buy-in. Mainline Linux kernel team, being inferior marketshare-wise, requests more buy-in and more collaboration from device manufacturers. This works for servers since there is pressure from end customers who want to retain UNIX-like environments. Normal consumers cannot exert the same amount of pressure. Microsoft provides subsystems, APIs and ABIs to write the drivers to OEMs, often consulting the first manufacturers of a certain new device type and making compromises for them. Linux on the other hand, requires competitors to collaborate and create the subsystems and APIs. Competitor players themselves have to agree with the developers of their competitors to create a subsystem. On a capitalist economy competitors do not want to collaborate unless it significantly increases market size for everyone. Consumer electronics have very thin margins. They do not scale well with increased effort required by Linux. Only select few big tech or certain old-school consultancies send the significant system patches.
This would not be the case in the hypothetical situation where Windows becomes a Linux distro.
Providing a closed-source friendly ecosystem for both the OS and the application layer is what Google did for early Android and that's why it caught on.
The advantages of Win32 and the filesystem structure on top of NT's technical advantages guarantees Microsoft's monopoly will go unchallenged for consumer devices. Linux has to become more like NT, not NT become Linux for success in consumer space. Linux will never become more like NT, so it will never get a stronghold.
The question for Linux (or any kernel / system layer) is very simple: If an OEM can hire developers who will independently play a mediator role under an NDA, creating stable kernel internal APIs that live more than 5 years, making sure the kernel is ready before launch without leaking any hardware specifics, Linux is a viable platform for mass-scale consumer hardware. If not, it isn't. Linux fails on all stages of that.
I know that they are, and it's sad, but I'm glad Linux (as opposed to some things built on Linux like Android) fundamentally holds this ideological position and takes a stand here. No PC hardware business would even exist if its base platform wasn't made to be an open on by IBM and Compaq in the early 80's.
Just look at what happened last week with linux distros needing to update their secure boot keys with a new MS signed certificate. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/expiration-secure-boot-signin...
And look at what MS did with their old version of Office for Mac, where they decided not to simply renew a certificate that would keep the software functioning. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/yo...
We already have companies like Nvidia and Broadcom shipping binary blobs to support common hardware. Do we really want a corporation like MS getting in on that kind of thing? If MS wrote some really great desktop linux software, it would be hard for the broader linux community to resist being lured into using MS controlled APIs, and handing over part of their control to Linux's most notable rival.
If I had a quid for every time I saw this comment on HN or Reddit I would probably be as wealthy as Gates himself. It is always an instant downvote for me, because they make me lose faith that people on HN have actually understood what a kernel is and how it works, and what ABI compatibility is, and what user-mode stability is. It is dogmatic and pointless.
The NT kernel is pretty good. Windows is generally well-architected. The NT kernel is the best thing about Windows, and you lot want to swap it out with something decidedly inferior.
Windows' user-mode applications and libraries are also pretty good. By user-mode apps and libraries I mean Win32 itself, WinRT, D2D/DirectWrite, D3D, Winsock, Windows Sound, and the thousands of entrypoints and enums for cool Windows stuff like the registry, synchronisation primitives, file management, special user files, cloud files, accessibility and internationalisation, and more. I've mentioned some other nice platform APIs in a sibling comment.
It is pretty easy to write a full-fledged GUI application on and for Windows that handles heavy use of networking, sound, graphics acceleration, etc without ever having to use a single third-party library, and make it run on OSs that are nearly 18 years old (not the case on most competition OSs).
I also daresay that IE/Edge moving to Chromium was in some ways a bad idea, as Chromium has become the de facto default Web platform, and any non-Chromium browser (Safari, Firefox) is likewise de facto non-conforming.
Two things I can think off off the top of my head that do completely suck about Windows: the forced updates and forced antivirus (e.g. Defender). None of those depend on the kernel, and Windows userland running on top of Linux wouldn't inherently make those two things suck less.
Except, the last thing we need is for Microsoft to own / embrace-extend-exterminate this. It's best that it's kept as an independent project, enabling developers to target the Windows API if they feel like it, while ensuring that they only target the Wine-compatible parts of it, which then enables their software to also run seamlessly on other platforms at no extra effort, and without requiring either the users or the devs to have to lock themselves into this ungodly telemetry-spying-ads-AI-.NET mess that the article talks about.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has zero to gain from making a Windows Lite variant themselves given their lifeline is exactly this telemetry-spying-ads-AI-.NET ecosystem; and they have zero to gain from absorbing ReactOS or similar projects, other than in order to eliminate them.
The reality is as you said, only Microsoft can make Windows Lite, and they don’t care to.
The "real work" part is mostly about the user. And that depends on available programs on the platform, not on the user's boundless love for telemetry.
OP seems to be mostly addressing developers here, so the point stands.
which is described as
A WinGet Configuration (DSC) file that sets up a clean, lightweight, distraction-free developer workstation. The goal is a PC state that devs actually love using: no clutter, no noise, just the tools you need. (...)
* A PC devs actually want to use. Clean Explorer, dark theme, no pop-ups, no recommendations, no widgets. Just your code and your tools. (...)
So much is optional and easily removed. You don't even have to pay for it any more, never mind $49. For the power users that he's talking about, I don't see the issue.
(I agree the default state for Windows is completely rotten, and it shouldn't be!)
("build" does seem to have been settled on as the word for the thing you do when you have the LLM write your code for you, but I'd have thought that "developer" is vague enough to cover both that and also doing it the old-fashioned way?)
Oh hell no. The one big pull keeping people on Windows (and, for similar reasons, Office) is the insane amount of legacy enterprise stuff that depends on it.
WINE and, with it, Valve/Proton have done a lot in that regard, but still, it's by far not enough.
OEM, retail, and consumers are not choosing the best product, they are hindered from having a choice.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
Aside from that, there are various tools and deployment files to automate a stripped down Windows 11 installation.
I don't really use Windows except on my gaming PC, but I like winutil:
https://github.com/christitustech/winutil
But there are better declarative tools out there that generate a stripped down installation. Despite it's reputation, Windows 11 is fairly modular for a commercial OS.
So, basically Linux with Wine/Proton?
Isn’t this basically what SteamOS does?
Sure ads and AI are horrible but they are root of like 5% of the Windows problems.
A good example of a real windows problem is the garbage filesystem performance
tbh the backwards compatibility is not the best and you might have better chance with Wine on Linux but it's still better than MacOS where even software from a couple years ago is unusuable (no 32 bit apps anymore). And will be only worse once Rosetta2 is dropped.
Not sure this is possible, or provides a meaningful ”lightness”. The 4.x CLR is an OS component as expected as Win32. You could have it as a separate download but I don’t really see the point.
I agree with the overall premise of the article though.
I’d like to go a step further. It shouldn’t just be ”light”, it should be power user focused. There are a thousand little annoyances that plague the OS (like defaulting to hiding file name extensions) which every technical-above-average user needs to adjust in every new install.
But I genuinely miss having the ability to take the bloat out before you ever install the OS
Not going to happen.
Win32 is stuck in Windows XP, most modern development has been on .NET, even if the core components are implemented in C++, exposed via COM.
PowerShell is all about .NET and COM interop.
I can install EndeavourOS in under 15 minutes, no annoying wizard of cruft, no online account needed, all updates out of the box (it updates it all during install). Fullly encrypted disk install - on windows you need pro iirc, I have direct access to Steam, Nvidia, Discord, etc in a simple "yay discord steam" command (Nvidia comes with the USB).
I am not forced to update, I have a friend who didnt update his arch box for like 3 years, upgraded it a week back or so ago and it all worked.
Windows needs to fire all the marketing people ruining the OS, fire whoever shoved JavaScript into places it didn't belong (unless they actually build a real JS runtime / UI for Windows not this React BS), and make the OS better. Windows 10 started okay but went downhill fast. Windows 11 is just Windows 10s worst parts with a new name.
I'm already set on wiping Windows eventually, but I wanted a fresh take on why I always go back to Linux since I had not used 11 yet. It's just abysmal.
I would rather pay Microsoft $99.99 flat for their own rendition of Wine with no telemetry, just a working Win32 environment I can run on any Linux distro, and it runs anything Windows designed fully natively in discrete sandboxing if I want it to. Till then Proton is free, and runs all my games.
Edit:
Also Windows does this really obnoxious thing now where they force all your critical folders into OneDrive out of the box. You have to go out of your way or anything you save a document or image it goes straight into OneDrive. That one pissed me off a ton.
On my Surface Book 2 every time I restart it for updates, I'm forced into a full screen ad for subscribing to Office, mind you, I had Office subscription for like 2 years, which I've since cancelled, and they still tried to force that ad on me.
Microsoft Windows is an ad infested OS, let me know when Microsoft starts selling an OS without the ads, till then I'll always find myself back on Linux.
Oh and I forgot to note, the guy who was checking me out at BestBuy, had a Microsoft shirt, so he asks if I wanted Office, I responded "nah I usually just install Linux" that was the end of any convo he hoped to pitch my way.
curious, though--why hasn't your friend updated his Arch distro in 3 years? bleeding edge is one of the benefits vs other distros, IMHO
The best part is I've been a .NET developer a good chunk of my career, so Microsoft is a company I've always worked with no matter what. If they offered me a Mac at work I would say yes please, since I know I can install .NET on a Mac anyway.
Can I get upvotes by inventing imaginary products ?
Microsoft doesn’t want 50$ from you once for a decade. They want you subscribed to OneDrive, Gamepass and Office 365.
If they care about consumers at all. Azure prints money. Windows is the defacto standard for most businesses.
Microsoft even contributes to WINE at this point. VS code is most popular IDE on Linux.
Heck, they wrote an official guide to use Gamepass cloud on SteamDeck. Cool use Linux, just keep paying Microsoft 30$ a month.
For desktop use, sure, $45 could fly, but, the main draw of windows is compatibility with existing software, and honestly that is no longer worth it.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry,
Exactly. They already have telemetry, so in theory they know what they are doing (?)
That will never happen. Much as I hate everything being subscription based these days, there is too much effort involved keeping it updated for security changes and dealing with advances in hardware for a cheap lifetime licence to be practical. The best we could hope for from them would be a buy-a-new-one-every-few-years model similar to how Windows and Office used to be sold to no-corp users.
MS would be better off ditching Windows for non-commercial users and concentrating on Azure, Office (pivoting more completely to online versions), SQL Server, and AI services (assuming that bubble doesn't burst too damagingly soon), with a few other things that prop these things up a bit largely by driving people to host them in Azure (VisualStudio & VS Code, DevOps, Exchange, Outlook, Teams, Windows Server for corps who need/want to self-host, Windows Desktop for corps only). Windows desktop for corporate use only makes things a lot easier - they can limit the hardware support needed to a whitelist, and discard a lot of backwards compatibility tech-debt, and so forth.
What would everyone else do? Use Linux or Apple, or one of the BSDs. They can still run VSCode (and maybe VS if that gets ported) to produce things hosted in Azure, they can still use hosted versions of Office/Outlook/Teams or perhaps even VS, so they aren't lost customers for the things that MS actually makes good money from (Windows Desktop has long since stopped being the cash-cow it once was). PC gamers would end up moving to consoles (or console-a-likes from the likes of Steam) including MS's offering if they keep in the games market.
Somehow I don't see this happening.
Or maybe we'll get a new more stripped down version of the "software engineer" deployment mode they released recently
There WILL be something slightly lighter with the ability to move the taskbar.
Yet it costs like 20x of regular Windows license while supporting almost none of the applications.
r/WindowsLTSC/wikiI feel like with gaming this is more or less becoming the reality. Disregarding online gaming [1], a lot of games are being written for "Windows" and being played on Linux. In reality, I think that a lot of newer games are kind of being written with Proton as the target, and the fact that they work on Windows is incidental.
[1] Which I know you can't fully "disregard" but I don't think it kills my point.
Lol, I wouldn't use it if they paid me to do it.
> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.
What? All modern Windows software requires .NET
Wow. Let's see what an informed opinion looks like.
> The best "Windows Lite" is a Linux distro with VSCode, .NET, PowerShell, etc.
Oh.... ok then.