Microsoft Needs Windows Lite, No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, to retain gamers and developers
3 months ago by VetOfTheSeas to c/technology
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.
Probably Microsoft's best stupidest name too, except maybe renaming the remote desktop app to "Windows App".
But it's so sloooowwww
no its not.
Yep. Plenty of games depends on it too.
We should also get rid of the Windows C++ Redistributable packages as well!
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.
.NET is arguably one of the better things to come out of Microsoft. The CLR only runs when a .NET application is running so it’s not bloat, and it’s pretty lightweight as far as a VM goes with JIT. It’s well documented, has public standards, is cross platform, and released under MIT.
I’m a Unix/Linux greybeard so I’ve no real skin in the game. But given how C# has become the defacto cross platform game development language of choice for both Godot and Unity engines, .NET deserves a little credit.
C#/.NET is easily the best thing Microsoft makes.
I realize the bar is pretty low.
Don't forget about excel.
Its so nice C# can run in Linux :).
At work, we joke that MS will eventually get tired of the OS game and just throw Windows tools on top of Linux and call it. Then just become a SaaS provider for everything else. Not WSL like legit linux kernel with Windows.
To quote Steve Ballmer; "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS [...] DEVELOPERS. YES!".
Realistically, who would even buy Windows Lite? What advantage would it have over regular Windows AND Linux systems?
A Windows that could run Office and Adobe software for work without giving the user brain damage? Sounds like a nice idea, maybe could even compete with Mac.
I remember saying that in the early 2000s...
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.
I had no idea how easy gaming had got since my last attempt with Linux. That was until the most recent Microsoft bugs erased all my files... I was so enraged I didn't even try to recover them, I just installed linux mint. Found out I could indeed play the couple games I've been holding on to windows for. Haven't booted windows since.
Microsoft is now offering Azure Linux.
What's wrong with .NET?
It's just a framework for some code (usually that written in C#) to run on. It's not a windows only thing either. Just that on Linux if it's required it'll just get installed via the package manager, so you won't see the usual GUI installer that is often packaged with some games (even though you might already have it installed).
It used to be VB.net and other such stuff. It WAS pretty terrible. Ive had to pick apart some pretty horrendous applications. Then Mono/C# popped up and a lot of community effort went into making everything better. It helps that .net stole a LOT of functionality from Rails/Django/etc... and make it much easier for devs to do actual work on it.
The problem is when we talk about .net it could be a huge combo of tech from the last 10+ years. The newest iteration is fine. Its fast at least with C#.
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.
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.
.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.)
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.
.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?
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.
What do you have to pay Microsoft for when using .NET?
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.
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.
Good luck with that. Linux is what you are looking for and it's here already.
Appears to be, that I am wrong too, they renamed the things a couple of times. Dot-NetCore is now DotNet and .NET Framework is the win lib that existed before NetCore and still does
Wow, it still notifies me. This, like I imagine most of life's mysteries, has a very mundane explanation. I had just woken up, and in the haze I thought I was in a Linux gaming sub and made a very gaming centric comment. I realized the focus was very obviously not on gaming only after I posted.
I hope you can sleep more soundly tonight knowing I'm ok <3
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.
For anyone running anticheat games Windows is the only option. Windows being utter shit might one day get them to give up these games just so they could ditch Windows. Which I'd welcome, but Microsoft probably doesn't.
Some anticheat games, yeah.
The vast majority of games, including most multiplayer games (and many with anticheat) work just fine on Linux today thanks to Proton, and even MacOSX is starting to catch up with GameHub.
For the few games that don't work right now, I can easily imagine someone filling the gap with a Windows dual boot partition (or even just a PS5).
I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Linux is closer to being what we need it to be today than Windows is. Windows has a lot of work to do, and even then it'll never be quite as open or computer geek-friendly as Linux. I don't see a good path forward for Windows, especially as casual users more deeper and deeper into mobile ecosystems.
.net (core) is a mature framework and collection of great languages that work really well, perform really well, and is truly cross platform and open source. It's the best thing Microsoft offers.
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.
I'll go one further and say IOT *Enterprise LTSC
Letting out the big secrets
Lol, Microsoft will never give up on telemetry and spying
Install Linux, Problem Solved.
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.
Yeah, the proprietary software grift is all about extorting companies with legal liability, hostage data, etc.
Some of Microsoft's corporate products are actually quite good, if very boring. I would love it if Linux had some version of Active Directory, although Microsoft's attempts to cloudify it are a very annoying. Fortunately you can just ignore that, at least for now.
They also get a lot of credit for releasing VSCode for free as well.
There are many alternatives to Active Directory, some even cross-platform. Microsoft basically has a monopoly in such things because those alternatives don't work well on Windows (both OS and Server).
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.
Good on ya it's a shame tons of popular games require Windows for their anti-cheat software to work
A lot of, perhaps all of, those games are predatory money extractors that are deliberately designed to be as addictive as possible, just like a casino.
Sticking to Windows to play them is like saying you need a car, because there are no bus stops near the casino. True, but should you really be going there in the first place?
I was going to push back on your point here, but then I couldn't think of a game that makes a good counterpoint.
Before they enshitified all the sports games, I would have pushed back a bit and comparer running Windows for a specific game to emulating an Atari for nostalgia.
But actually, the last good version of many of those sports games probably runs in Wine now anyway.
One pushback - there's still community on some of those very shitty games. I understand people not wanting to leave their gamer group behind.
Of course, my gamer group all moved to SteamDeck.
I was going to push back on your point here, but then I couldn't think of a game that makes a good counterpoint.
The Finals, Battlefield 5 (amazingly it has no loot boxes), Helldivers 2, Arc Raiders, all have anti-cheat so need kernel level access, but they're not predatory.
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.
This is because they constantly need to "develop" it to give it new "features" and "improvements". Bitch, Office peaked at 2007-2010, move onto innovating somewhere else.
I fill out a good number of reports. I can't always be bothered to do it, and they probably don't read them anyways because of the swearing
it's not my job to do QA on their shitty products
and our IT support doesn't know what causes some issues or how to resolve them either, so it's not likely a user skill issue.
if you're not coming across issues with Microsoft products, it's more than likely that you're simply not actually using them
The only real issues I come across are issues with their new features like intune stuff on mac. The core stuff all work pretty reliably with little to no maintenance and have great documentation. The only complaints I ever see/hear for teams, onedrive and 365 apps are users being dumb or caused by device issues. There are of course microsoft outages (often) but they fix themselves most of the time.
I will never forget the bewilderment I felt the first time the File Explorer crashed -- and that hasn't been the only time. Forget Office, they can't even get the start menu to work properly. Call it feature rich if you like, but of any modern OS they are the furthest away from the core stuff working reliably in my experience.
Hm, sounds shilly.
Nah, Windows is getting terrible. I had to delete AI.exe and aimgr.DLL to get performance back in the office suite. Updates try to out it back, and I know as soon as its deployed because everything runs like crap. And there's Onedrive that locks up the system while it syncs a newly written local PC file to the cloud. Like it should immediately write local, and sync in the background but it waits for the commit back from one drive
My armchair diag is that you're causing your own issues by doing things the wrong way. Disable it via policy not by deleting random files. How could onedrive lock a computer up syncing a file that doesnt even make any sense since it does write it local and sync in the background. It sounds like you were trying to save to a network folder or sharepoint maybe.
I couldn't find a policy for the ai. Exe, but when it's deleted the PC runs fine.
No on the network, we don't have typical network shares.
It's my C drive, and file explorer locks up until sync has happened. Because I see the spinning sync icons, as soon as sync has happened to one drive the file is accessible and apo saving it gets a commit back that it happened and is functional again. These are some of the problems, but there are tons more.
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.
Ouch!
The good news is you'll get invited to Cobol/AS400/Mainframe conventions if eventually you're the only ones left on Windows.
Those folks have similar challenges, but are great to party with after a day of conference talks.
I used to work at a place that had dot matrix printers for printing on envelopes, there was some complicated reason why this couldn't be upgraded, anyway the computer that ran that was an Acorn, with all its three mouse button goodness, it could only save to floppy disk and the only supplier of old floppy disks is like this one random dude who seems to have bought up the global supply of floppy disks back when they were discontinued. Apparently he makes bank.
Apparently he makes bank.
Epic!
I wonder if they see the constant, gigantic updates to the framework distributable and think that's a bad thing somehow.
I wouldn't, but many of my friends that I finally convinced to switch to Linux would definitely consider it. They switched specifically because MS went too far and made things too awful, and gaming in Linux is now quite decent. They aren't using Linux for the open source philosophy, or to tinker in ways that Windows blocked decades ago, or even the free price tag.
I would be quite prepared to pay a price for an operating system if it meant that it just works the way that Windows just works but without all the bloat. I'm really not all that interested and installing an operating system that likes to fight me.
Are you assuming that Windows users would do the smart thing? They've already failed.
Lots of games, especially indy games, rely on .NET, like Stardew Valley, and Terraria.
and developers
Windows developers largely use Windows Server or Enterprise, neither of which have telemetry, spying, ads, or AI, depending on group policy.
I'm a little confused by the inclusion of .NET. Most Windows developers actively use that.
What you're describing is the LTSC IoT editions, which are what I run on my Windows boxes.
Seconded. I moved to Win10 LTSC IoT on some, Bazzite on others, and haven't looked back.
I'm never loading naked spyware Win11 again.
When forced to move off win10iot I'll go to win11iot for anything mission critical for windows.
But by then I'd better be 90% MacOS/Linux.
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.
Closest thing to that is using Windows Enterprise. Here is previous PSA of mine...
00000
PSA, for people sticking to Windows:
You can get a reasonable level of privacy by installing Windows Enterprise via RUFUS, which also has options for removing restrictions during installation. Massgravel is used to activate your copy of Windows, the Github also having .ISOs for you to use with RUFUS.
ShutUp10 is a piece of software that goes a step further, allowing you to toggle off many bad things, uninstall Microsoft's AI, and gives a description of what you are tweaking does. The premium version also automatically applies your settings at all times, reverting Microsoft's constant tweaking of your settings.
There's something sad about that text. Feels like someone so addicted to a failing corporate product, that can't even imagine life without it, and will beg for a better version and continuity of the monopoly, instead finding an alternative and moving on with life
shear
"sheer", here.
Isnt that basically enterprise?
It was my understanding enterprise edition stripped out all that bullshit.
Tbf their main userbase comes from it being preinstalled.
Imagine if highschools spent one day in tech classes teaching how to install a new OS instead of microsoft word for the 640th time.
iot is stripped-down 'windows lite' but they don't sell that to the masses they're trying to hoover-up data on, sling bullshit at, or trick into subscribing to stuff.
iot is excellent on the desktop or as a gamer. its existence is proof that none of the bullshit microsoft's been peddling is actually needed in the os, and that crap actually hurts performance and stability.
they really don't though, especially developers. doing dev work on NixOS for example is like night and day compared to everything else. I can't imagine now not getting work done without NixOS. flakes and stuff just make every build so incredibly easy and because of which no matter where I put the thing I know it's going to work.
Even gaming, outside of a few games, works flawlessly. Hell even pirating now works fairly well. Emulation too. I can pick which cores I want via my gaming nix module and it's all good to go. it's great.
It's called TempleOS.
Unfortunately, a fair chunk of my convenience comes from the .NET runtime, but sure, removing the rest would be welcome. I highly doubt they'd bother to do this, though, because so many businesses with higher-tolerance older CEOs are fine with remaining on Windows...
@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.
He probably meant Adobe.
Freecad is nowhere near pro packages which is what is keeping me on windows
If you are techy enough you could install a cracked version of w11 pro or LTSC, then use amiliorated or any other decrapifier. As well Chris titus script can help. This will remove all telemetry and various MS malware.
Im using it since a while to game and it's great. Also not memory intensive and no shit running in the background or reinstalling after updates
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.
Microsoft is like a burning high-rise that will occasionally put out the fire in one section, and start another in another section. And there’s billions of people in there.
There are other high-rises, which very rarely catch fire at all, and you’ve tried to tell people to get out and go into the other ones but they don’t.
You’ve watched the microsoft fire burn for almost 30 years. Or more. You’re just astounded how not only are there still people in there, but they still refuse to leave. Just - dealing with the smoke and flames all day every day. It’s madness.
It was always the Office suite that was the core of Microsoft. Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Businesses can’t get off due to the perceived disruption.
Linux mint is perfect for my needs, and its pretty cool once you get used to doing stuff in terminal, although its still very user friendly for most. Microslop can suck my nuts.
Isn’t this just Windows Embedded?
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.
@lemmy.world
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
go to feed...
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.
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