Technology

to little, not late. Been a avid windows user since `95, used all of them up to 11 no exception, pivoted 3 years ago to linux, and at this point there is literally not a thing that will bring me back. Linux is 1000x better for me, free of charge, more polished, faster, better looking, no BS, and if there IS any bs, i can move to another distro that i like. There is literally not a single thing. Those kernel level anti cheat games... fuck em, i got 1000's of games to play that work on steam and gog and uplay and battle.net and all other platforms flawlessly no problem and been waiting to play em.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Lots of games, especially indy games, rely on .NET, like Stardew Valley, and Terraria.

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

The last time they intentionally built Windows lite was XP. This was well before SSDs, so it will not sparingly use your SSD if you're getting any ideas of trying it.

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

You have been able to make custom installs of Windows that remove all these things since at least Windows 98. Though without .NET, a ton of shit will stop working as it's a library of functions/runtime environments.

That won't work. How are you supposed to draw the line between what is/isn't spyware? Inevitably, MS would say, "we don't consider this to be telemetry/spyware/etc." and users will disagree, and MS will tell them to shove it.

Besides, Google has all of the shit that's mentioned and gamers/developers don't care, so I doubt it would make any difference at all. The fact is, Windows is a garbage system to develop for. Linux is the best system to use for deployments, Windows will never come close, and that's ultimately what's going to decide where developers go. And gamers are too niche for MS to care. The dominoes will really start falling when business customers start switching to Linux en masse.

And this is inevitable. When it comes to business use, open systems always win in the end.

@VetOfTheSeas — you mentioned content creation and gaming as the last anchors, and that's where I'd push back slightly. Content creation tools (Davinci Resolve, Blender, Final Cut) run on Linux now. The stickiness isn't the OS anymore, it's the plugin ecosystem and GPU drivers. Windows still wins on CUDA driver maturity, but that's narrowing. Gaming's the real hold, but Proton's been closing the gap for two years. If Windows Lite shipped without the telemetry tax, it might actually feel like a platform built for creators instead of a platform mining them for data. That's the retention angle that could work.

You can have it now. Just buy a enterprise license and manage with active directory. If you pay the big dollars you can turn stuff off.

shear

"sheer", here.

There's no money to get or data to sell from that though, so it's not gonna happen.

All the things that are easily disabled? -Sounds as foolish as having a distro for changing wallpaper, fonts and color scheme.

Not really. Windows can shoot people's dogs and people would still use it, look for "disable targeting feature debloat" or something.