The blog post sums up why users of Windows might want this.
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.
LTSC, surprised the post doesn't mention that. No forced feature updates, no unnecessary preinstalled apps. I'm using them for years without any problems. There was only one extreme edge case where an app didn't work because it was hard coded to only work on Windows 10 Pro and couldn't do anything with the LTSC version.
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.
OP says Windows needs builders to make applications and that is what Windows Lite would enable (or expand) but then says Windows Lite shouldn't include .NET one of the primary frameworks to build applications on Windows.
The .NET that comes with Windows is the ridiculously outdated .NET Framework 4.8. But most greenfield projects should have been using the newer .NET (previously .NET Core) for several years now, which is installed separately or deployed as self-contained apps.
"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."
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.
> The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming.
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.
I like the idea, but I don't really see why this would change the 'Builder' population. Gamers would love it (I have a Windows 10 install around for gaming, I'd take this in a flash, I'd probably not even complain too much about the money), but that isn't the same. To make it work for builders it needs to be an attractive place to do development and I don't see how this really helps with that (other than maybe improving the audience for their products). Although I am speculating there - I haven't written any code on Windows for maybe 15 years now and I don't expect ever to do so again.
> Windows Lite is $49 for a permanent license. No subscriptions.
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.
Ever since Win11 I lost all desire to retain Windows. I still have Win10 on my computer on the left side, mostly for testing, but I also decided it will be my last version of Windows anyway. Now, I have been using Linux since many years, so it is not an issue, but Win11 feels as if Microsoft finally declared total war on the user and I can't support that anymore. The telemetry sniffing and spying and now the upcoming age sniffing - sorry, my energy will only go towards opposing Microsoft now. I think it is time for ALL users to stop accepting these corrupt corporate overlords in general and the paid lobbyists that work for them. Mandatory age sniffing is the thing that will break societies here; mandatory AI slop also contributed to this problem.
Microsoft needs to repeat their Edge trick. Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box. Immense research of running Windows programs on Linux was already done by Wine/Proton teams.
I don’t think things are quite so dire for Windows. People (including me) have been predicting the end of Windows due to losing mindshare with builders since the turn of the century, and it still hasn’t happened.
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.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing. Windows Lite is just win32 with a lightweight shell and graphics drivers.
Not trying to offend anyone at all but this is a prescription for the symptom not the disease. M$FT marketing would loooove to create WindowsLite. In fact the did it already back in the day -- and the public fell for it. WindowsME/SE/CE anyone? What utter pieces of garbage.
The real problem is that they still have a moat (the Microsoft tax) on computer manufacturers which keeps their bloatware everywhere. It's one of the more brilliant things Gates pulled off and it's what allowed Ballmer's incompetence to go (almost) unnoticed for years.
The other moat which the author correctly points out is inertia. All of the Microsoft faithful that don't want to learn something new (and I don't blame them -- that's a big letting go and reinvestment).
And Apple could very well fall into the same hide-behind-the-moat behavior. It's what MBAs and beancounters gets you -- something Jobs was able to mostly avoid. But if we're being open-eyed about this, let's not put them on too high of a pedestal.
I'm not at all saying I know where things are going but I do think it involves a Unix philosophy at the core. I think WSL bought Microsoft valuable time but it's embarrassingly obvious that Win32 has just turned to crap and bloat.
The Linux/BSD APIs have their warts too but I'll take those warts any day.
84 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 67.3 ms ] threadHowever, 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.
What? All modern Windows software requires .NET
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
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.
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.
Lol, I wouldn't use it if they paid me to do it.
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.
So, basically Linux with Wine/Proton?
Isn’t this basically what SteamOS does?