this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Many of us started running Windows Server and endpoints, but in my case, the cost and substandard tools turned me away. I was running A DLNA server and using WDS (yes, very overkill for home, but fun to learn for work), but then I found TrueNAS (then called FreeNAS) running on BSD. I now run a simple share from there and Kodi on my (Linux and Android) user endpoints. I don't bother with imaging anymore, and use
ddfor backups to my NAS. My Firewall runs OPNSense (BSD) and I run OpenWRT on two TrendNet WAPs.I'll never go back to MS. It's just not a welcoming platform from my perspective. Don't even get me started on .NET or the various and sundry "redistributables" constantly required by every tool you try to use.
It's absurd but Linux is far worse. Instead of addressing library bloat and versioning we have Docker which just throws EVERYTHING into a bag and makes you download an entire OS environment space to run one app.
And that is perfect. Instead of setting up one VM for each service and manually updating all dependencies, I’d much rather use that very handy bag with everything in it.
But the op is complaining about the much lighter .net where the shared libraries for all apps are a fraction of the space of bringing in an entire OS environment for each and every app.
That's not Linux, though; that's docker.
.net isn't Windows.
dotnet is pretty great, runs great on Linux, and you can ship your executable without a need for an external framework if you want.
Dotnet is also open source, a strongly typed language, a large standard library so it doesn't have the problems of npm, has great performance and is all around the best language out there imo.
Use rust if you need to be closer to the metal, but that's rare.
Maybe now. .NET wasn't always open, used to be Windows-only, was buggy, version-dependent (but not as bad as the jre could be; true), and had (still has) poor resource-management. I think you're talking about .NETCore.
That said, I wasn't commenting on the code viability (I'm not a professional developer) so much as the support overhead required (back when I worked support) for the different versions of .NET, especially when MS stopped including v3.5 in Windows except by using "features and programs" or downloading and installing it manually.
Yeah, that's pretty dated. There's one flavor of dotnet (more or less) that runs on everything, and it's about as efficient as anything with a garbage collector can be.
There are hairs that could be split in there, such as the release cadence, hosting bundle vs desktop runtime, but that's all much simpler than it used to be. You generally know if you want to run a desktop app vs a webserver.