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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

     r/WindowsLTSC/wiki

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