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.

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.

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.

No .NET 😂 what's still running after that?

Microsoft needs to die.

Windows losing noticeable numbers of users is a huge net gain for society. Hopefully it continues, regardless of Microslop's actions.

Microsoft is losing Builders fast.

Good.

This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.

No, Windows needs to lose more users. Hope they never change.

the fact that you list .net shows you dont have the knowledge to make this claim

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.

What's wrong with .NET?

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.

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.

It's easier to just use Linux.

Good luck with that. Linux is what you are looking for and it's here already.

We have that. Its called Arch. And I've done .net development on it.

But here's the big problem: stripping all of the terrible shit out of Windows doesn't make it better than Linux, it just makes it less bad than Windows is today.

What is wrong with .NET, it's very useful when running applications which require it which of course is basically every application in a corporate environment.

But yeah all the other things are fine.

windows lite

So you mean Linux? No telemetry? No ads? No AI? No .net? Also just works? Also free? Also free as in beer?

Yeah, people need Linux

Micro$lop wants to become what IBM was. They want corporate money and subscriptions. They hate users anyway.

why would they? the telemetry, spying and bloatware is the whole idea for them. At least for regular users. We are the product and the data they harvest from us and ads they force on us is the point. And why would they care, majority of people just sticks with whatever was presented to them first. No matter how much bloat and spyware they add, majority will never care enough to do anything about it because it doenst directly affect them beyond slowing the computer down, which they think will be solved by buying a new one.

The closest thing is LTSC, but Linux is easier to deal with imo

Install Linux, Problem Solved.

Lol, Microsoft will never give up on telemetry and spying

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows-11-identifier-used-to-track-scattered-spider-perp-after-microsoft-shared-info-with-fbi-19-year-old-us-estonian-hacker-arrested-over-alleged-ties-to-infamous-extortion-group

I'm building a gaming PC that's gonna run Linux. To prep, I install my distro of choice (CachyOS) on an old laptop to check it out. It was fantastic. I'm confident saying, unless there's a very specific outlier reason, you don't need Windows anymore.

Hah! They don't care about "builders" or users. They care about business. Specifically large enterprises the have too many people to care about a single employee's individual productivity.

Microsoft caters mostly to them and is quite good at that.

But if you're an end user, gamer, or individual consumer, just move to Linux already. They don't care about you.

Do i have news for you, youll need .net.
Either for windows stuff, or for your games ( most likely launchers )

fuck, they need that to retain business customers.

It's becoming ridiculous how much lost time there is at work because of Microsoft bullshit. Teams doesn't work, OneDrive doesn't sync, Outlook won't find anything for you, all of the office programs are becoming more difficult to use and slower...

I've got a team of about a dozen people and we probably lose an entire person's work day every single week just to Microsoft bullshit. not even regular issues, just straight up bullshit that shouldn't happen.

if I weren't so busy, I'd be looking into switching my team to Linux. but at some point it's going to get bad enough and I'm going to be low enough on work (lol okay not likely) that I'll be able to properly investigate a transition. Microsoft is the weak point of pretty much every process at our company.

except for excel. that's still doing okay. not great, but okay.

The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming

You're forgetting the huge and much more lucrative market that is businesses. We literally can't switch away from windows because every single piece of engineering software we use only exists for windows. We can't program anything, configure anything, deploy anything or service anything if we're not running windows. Oh, a VM solution you suggest? wrong!, because the drivers needed to interface with the hardware are wonky as hell as is but inside VMs it gets the job borked half the time making my job unnecessary frustrating.

Why is .NET bad now?

I logged out back in December and haven't used or needed Windows since. Fedora Linux is my pick for a Windows replacement.

That's just Windows without a lot of the bad stuff. Microsoft will never do it because they earn money from it.

If a "lite" version removed their ability to spy on you they'd have to charge you $4,000/year for the privilege, just to make up the difference.

If there was a viable Windows Lite, wouldn’t everyone just use that?