Microsoft is losing Builders fast. They’re switching to MacOS and Linux. The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming. However, even these are falling to Linux.
Without Builders, you don’t have software, and without software, you don’t have users. This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.
10 years ago I would have said maybe. Now? Practicly everything that you run on Windows will run, in some form or another, on Linux. Even the hard to crack gaming is now becoming a non issue. There really is no point in Windows any longer.
I had no idea how easy gaming had got since my last attempt with Linux. That was until the most recent Microsoft bugs erased all my files… I was so enraged I didn’t even try to recover them, I just installed linux mint. Found out I could indeed play the couple games I’ve been holding on to windows for. Haven’t booted windows since.
Microsoft is now offering Azure Linux.
well, linus won. He said when they’d write software for linux, he won. I guess he quadruple won, since microslop has their own distro
Microsoft needs to accept that their time has passed
Why is .NET bad now?
I wonder if they see the constant, gigantic updates to the framework distributable and think that’s a bad thing somehow.
and developers
Windows developers largely use Windows Server or Enterprise, neither of which have telemetry, spying, ads, or AI, depending on group policy.
I’m a little confused by the inclusion of .NET. Most Windows developers actively use that.
A lot of games actually require it too
That’s just Windows without a lot of the bad stuff. Microsoft will never do it because they earn money from it.
I logged out back in December and haven’t used or needed Windows since. Fedora Linux is my pick for a Windows replacement.
.Net
With many critical apps still running on Windows only, Windows needs to get worse!
To push those software companies over to embrace Linux finally. Then the users can follow.What you’re describing is the LTSC IoT editions, which are what I run on my Windows boxes.
Seconded. I moved to Win10 LTSC IoT on some, Bazzite on others, and haven’t looked back.
I’m never loading naked spyware Win11 again.
When forced to move off win10iot I’ll go to win11iot for anything mission critical for windows.
But by then I’d better be 90% MacOS/Linux.
I would assume that still has telemetry spyware. ie windows GDID
Linux mint is perfect for my needs, and its pretty cool once you get used to doing stuff in terminal, although its still very user friendly for most. Microslop can suck my nuts.
Isn’t this just Windows Embedded?
If you want Windows Lite then you might as well commit to Linux.
Plenty of YouTube videos on tons of different distros for anyone to find their starter distro that’s similar to Windows.
.NET is just a runtime, not problematic at all, and definitely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ads, spyware, and AI.
It’s probably Microsofts best product
Probably Microsoft’s best stupidest name too, except maybe renaming the remote desktop app to “Windows App”.
I hate that rename so much, it makes it impossible to search anything about it. Another fun fact is the process name for “Windows App” is Windows365.exe 🤦
But it’s so sloooowwww
Compares to what? Electron apps or ffmpeg level of assembler?
Native?!
Maybe have a look at https://michaelscodingspot.com/csharp-performance-vs-c/
Native what? AoT compiled dotnet code? Bad C++ code?
I suppose bad C++ code if those are the only options?
Of course not. But saying an entire framework is bad is silly. That is my entire point. Thanks for agreeing with me.
no its not.
It’s only slow if you’re running a slow computer. Anyway it’s way faster than all your electron apps which each insist on taking up four for gigabytes of RAM
Yep. Plenty of games depends on it too.
We should also get rid of the Windows C++ Redistributable packages as well!
Might as well get rid of Windows after that
to little, not late. Been a avid windows user since `95, used all of them up to 11 no exception, pivoted 3 years ago to linux, and at this point there is literally not a thing that will bring me back. Linux is 1000x better for me, free of charge, more polished, faster, better looking, no BS, and if there IS any bs, i can move to another distro that i like. There is literally not a single thing. Those kernel level anti cheat games… fuck em, i got 1000’s of games to play that work on steam and gog and uplay and battle.net and all other platforms flawlessly no problem and been waiting to play em.
Microsoft is not going to remove .NET to attract software developers when they want developers to use .NET. Not having access to software that uses .NET probably wouldn’t be a good trade off for how little removing it from Windows would do to make Windows lighter.
.NET is arguably one of the better things to come out of Microsoft. The CLR only runs when a .NET application is running so it’s not bloat, and it’s pretty lightweight as far as a VM goes with JIT. It’s well documented, has public standards, is cross platform, and released under MIT.
I’m a Unix/Linux greybeard so I’ve no real skin in the game. But given how C# has become the defacto cross platform game development language of choice for both Godot and Unity engines, .NET deserves a little credit.
C#/.NET is easily the best thing Microsoft makes.
I realize the bar is pretty low.
Don’t forget about excel.
Its so nice C# can run in Linux :).
At work, we joke that MS will eventually get tired of the OS game and just throw Windows tools on top of Linux and call it. Then just become a SaaS provider for everything else. Not WSL like legit linux kernel with Windows.
There are also lots of games that use .NET.
To quote Steve Ballmer; “DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS […] DEVELOPERS. YES!”.
