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Microsoft Needs Windows Lite, No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, to retain gamers and developers (philipbohun.com)

submitted 1 day ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to c/technology@lemmy.world

156 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] 79WistfulVista@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] hdsrob@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] 79WistfulVista@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

.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.)

[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

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.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

.NET Core is likely to be around for a long time.

You wish.

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.

Why bother? Just to keep paying MS?

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 hours ago

What do you have to pay Microsoft for when using .NET?

[–] 79WistfulVista@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Why bother? Just to keep paying MS?

Scalability was the primary reason. An application running on physical Windows-based servers can't quickly scale up and down, leading to higher hosting costs due to everything scaled to maximum capacity at all times. Or, more often, leading to slow performance and lost revenue due to the customer not wanting to pay for maximum hosting capacity at all times. So the customers want scalable cloud hosting. And when losing a customer often means a loss of millions of dollars in revenue for my former employer, they want to keep those customers.

A secondary goal is increasing the speed of deployment for new customers. Scripting the entire environment - including servers, network, storage - can make it very fast to spin up a new customer or testing environment. That can be done without .NET, of course, but .NET Core is the obvious next step for a large distributed enterprise product suite that is (was) already running on .NET Framework.

.NET Core isn't a primary platform for desktop or mobile client applications. It is very common as a hosting platform; that is likely to continue.