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.
.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 🤦
Yep. Plenty of games depends on it too.
We should also get rid of the Windows C++ Redistributable packages as well!
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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.
To quote Steve Ballmer; “DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS […] DEVELOPERS. YES!”.
The author of the blog is living in dreamland. Microsoft will never release Windows Lite because, to management, Windows is a conduit for AI and subscriptions.
Linux is the answer.
Realistically, who would even buy Windows Lite? What advantage would it have over regular Windows AND Linux systems?
A Windows that could run Office and Adobe software for work without giving the user brain damage? Sounds like a nice idea, maybe could even compete with Mac.
Microsoft needs to die.
I remember saying that in the early 2000s…
Microsoft is losing Builders fast.
Good.
This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.
No, Windows needs to lose more users. Hope they never change.
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
Windows losing noticeable numbers of users is a huge net gain for society. Hopefully it continues, regardless of Microslop’s actions.
What’s wrong with .NET?
the fact that you list .net shows you dont have the knowledge to make this claim
You need to abandon windows. You know their goals. You know they can’t be trusted. Stop giving them chances to get it right and fuck you.
It’s easier to just use Linux.
I’m a 30-year ex-Windows developer - started with C/C++ briefly, moved to Java for a few years, and then to C#/.NET for about 23 years. Good riddance to Microsoft Windows. The keyboard shortcuts may be forever ingrained into my reflexes, but I’d rather use Linux or MacOS.
No concerns about .NET however. It’s a cross-platform development framework and works well. It’s also quite fast now.
Modern. Net is portable and fast, yes. But .NET framework is (mostly) not portable and it’s tied to the version of Windows is on. We’ll see when Microsoft decides to EOL it but so far it has not been announced. It’s not getting more than security updates now, as far as I know.
We’re converting everything we can (mostly web apps) to modern .Net (formerly core) so it can run on Linux. I may be stuck on Windows at work for the office apps, but my code runs on Linux.
.NET Framework specifically - yeah. That’s on life support. .NET Core is likely to be around for a long time. I spent the last few years at my former employer working on transitioning our server-side business layer components to .NET Core so they could run in Linux containers. Someone else got to deal with the Kubernetes aspect - thank goodness.
Now I usually avoid thinking about any of that. (Oops.)
Good call. I’m getting mired in the k8s side right now and we have dozens of small web apps that need upgraded and a couple beefier framework apps that need essentially rewritten. Unfortunately I can’t escape lol.
We an ecosystem I overall like .net core and I agree it will stick around. I just can’t wait to get off IIS and into Linux even if that means complicating things with kubernetes.
when Microsoft decides to EOL
Will never happen. The freaking VB6 runtime is still supported in Win11, and there’s a mountain of .NET Framework code still out there.
Framework 4.8 still gets regular security updates, and will for years to come.
Yeah I’m not holding my breath. It will be around for a long time.
A couple of things I could see changing that would be a) Microsoft in financial trouble, b) AI both making it harder to keep up with security bugs, and making it easier to migrate away from legacy systems.
The chances of .net framework being among the first to go is slim though.
We have that. Its called Arch. And I’ve done .net development on it.
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Whenever I see this, I’m curious as to why
Wow, it still notifies me. This, like I imagine most of life’s mysteries, has a very mundane explanation. I had just woken up, and in the haze I thought I was in a Linux gaming sub and made a very gaming centric comment. I realized the focus was very obviously not on gaming only after I posted.
I hope you can sleep more soundly tonight knowing I’m ok <3
Yeah that’s cool, fair enough. Be well!
For what its worth, gaming on linux is dope. Never ever going back.
Good luck with that. Linux is what you are looking for and it’s here already.
