* Will only be used by a TINY subset of ultra-enthusiasts (no, neither HN or Reddit are majorities)
* Every user on it is less telemetry and less advertisement
The reality is that most users don't care, and will just use whatever seems to work fine. Finding out that 'oh yeah, feature/software X does not work on Windows Lite" will inevitably mean that almost everyone stays on mainline.
I don't get why people bother making these wish fulfillment posts regarding Windows. It is what it is, either get used to it or use something else. MS hasn't been listening and they aren't going to start. Your wallet and mine don't make even the tiniest dent in their bottom line.
The sad truth is Microsoft is so heavily invested in and indebted by AI, advertising and telemetry that the only way Windows lite would ever get the greenlight is if the company tanks, loses billions and pivots away from everything they've been pushing for the last decade.
And then maybe we could get the dream that is Windows lite
I agree with your reasons but not with "the majority doesn't care". Sure they do. The internet is filled with Windows hate, and Reddit isn't as small as you remember it to be.
The majority has no other option. Linux is too much trouble to learn and Mac requires a new device. What else are you supposed to do?
The majority also wants their stuff to work - the program that solves a problem or the hardware they bought, and all that surface area to support it is how Windows is Windows.
> What else are you supposed to do?
Customize. You can strip out entire features, often called “debloat” but it’s hyper specific. It couldn’t be a general purpose pc after, and a debloated gaming config might lack the support to run other kinds of apps, or vice versa.
They even have a lightly modified version called LTSC although it retains so much feature surface area so as to remain “Windows” it’s not like the article’s idea, but it exists.
Hey, Mac is a huge learning experience too. If your mind is set in the ways of Windows, you are gonna have a bad time when you assume Mac is just as bad (easy example: using clunky Windows workarounds to avoid problems that don't exist on Mac). You almost become oblivious to the straightforward way of doing things because Windows is so fucky. It can be really hard to get an average person used to Windows to find value in Mac, because they don't naturally see the simplification to their workflow, they just expect Mac to work the same way (ie, for their workarounds to function the same way).
Up until OS 26 I'd agree with you but honestly it's not far off from windows other than some small permissions annoyances and the stupid natural scrolling. I got a neo out of desperation to do some audio work and immediately felt at home where I never did on my older Air.
I strongly prefer natural scrolling, though I did grow up with it. I think 26 was a huge mis-step and Apple is going to need to go back on a lot of what they did (which they are starting to do with 27, though they have a long ways to go).
I miss how tight the older versions were. They were technical and got the job done -- the newer designs seem like they're trying too hard to be round and big and friendly. Everything is so spaced out, so much is wasted, information density is pretty much completely gone. It's so sad.
My Intel MBP is still on 10.14.6 because even Catalina was too much for me (removing 32-bit support is kind of a full-reinstall sort of move). But Big Sur looked kinda awful the moment I saw it and Tahoe feels like the Mac is completely losing its identity and principles.
I'm on ASi now and running the latest macOS 27 beta. I don't regret it but I just feel sad, you know?
Don’t know about tiny subset. Every enterprise workstation in the world would probably be running it.
Also the OP specifically fantasizes about unchanged compatibility.
Really there would be no reason not to use this, so it would likely have to be more expensive than the regular spyware/adware version. Thus it couldn’t get away with the name “Lite” and would end up being called “Professional”.
With over 1 billion monthly active users, reddit is not a minority and is a significant fraction of internet users. Btw, people complain about Windows bloat on Whatsapp too. Now, that IS a majority of internet users.
You have to realize that the majority of reddit "users" are either bots (especially now with LLMs making it so easy to generate text on the fly) or utterly braindead. Just last week I got banned and comment deleted from a subreddit calling out someone for deliberately spreading false information. Their comment? Still there.
I have one friend who just loves listening to AI readings of AI-generated drama farming content purporting to be real content from Reddit. It's bizarre.
I also found at least one subreddit for a product which specifically banned posts with the word "scam" in them when I went to make a post about the product being a scam. If that doesn't tell you how much of a scam it actually is, I don't know what does.
Even before the rise of LLMs, everyone knew Reddit was astroturfed to hell and back.
Reddit mods are largely paid shills. Reddit users are zombies. It's worthless to consider the site as a good source of information or sentiment anymore.
No, Reddit users are not braindead or zombies. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet with a varied demographic. They are just normal people.
This is also true, but for what I was calling out, people do pay off mods to supress or promote certain content on the subs they moderate or mods push their own sites or products if they have something to push.
I agree. I seriously doubt making that an option would stop people moving to Apple or Linux especially with MacBook Neo and Steam Machine. Windows has much bigger problem than telemetry and advertisement.
But both of these products would only show damage in the very long run, which also means M$ won't react to it until late.
Good point, but they don't market it for general consumption, which seems to be the suggestion.
I honestly don't think windows is worth any price. Unix is the platform of builders, and nobody needs a middleman charging them to breathe air (run an os).
LTSC, surprised the post doesn't mention that. No forced feature updates, no unnecessary preinstalled apps. I'm using them for years without any problems. There was only one extreme edge case where an app didn't work because it was hard coded to only work on Windows 10 Pro and couldn't do anything with the LTSC version.
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.
But that's also kind of the point too: Windows Lite exists but MSFT is "gatkeeping" it to enterprise users only. Probably because they are paying for it.
Seconding the correction that LTSC is not restricted to hardware OEMs. I work for a multinational construction materials company and we image LTSC machines day in day out.
Economically, you would probably be the only customer (stated willingness to pay can differ from market outcome ;) paying that amount. Your stated willingness to pay has little relation to the true value of our data and digital sovereignty to Microsoft.
A funny estimate is possible though. MSFT 2750 G$
market cap and 550 M business users. That’s 5 k$ per user. Grossly misrepresenting everything (AI bubble, other cashflows, …) but it is a ‘directionally right’.
Indeed there are much more customers than you could imagine in the non-profit/ government sectors paying for that. There are a lot of compliance regulations regarding to data governance that force them to use a clean and lite LTSC version of Windows.
It's not cheap, but getting it legally is easy, and you don't need a VAR.
Specifically, you can buy a single-seat Microsoft 365 E3 subscription directly from Microsoft for $432/year, which includes a license for a single user to use Windows Enterprise, including LTSC, on up to 5 PCs (along with other stuff, mainly Office).
I'm using ltsc windows 11 and yes it is much better than one of my other pcs which has pro on it.
However I did use windows 10 ltsc for quite a few years until I hit a dll issue with an old game that turned out to be unresolvable as far as I could tell at the time. So much so I switched to pro (I have a work visual studio subscription so I have access to all versions of windows for free). I can't for the life of me remember what dll or what game it was. But I tend to play older games so probably not something many will hit the same problem.
I wonder if they don’t include all the application compatibility stuff in LTSC. It would be a good way to make the version work for its intended purpose (as part of a larger appliance or industrial tool with purpose built software), while making it much less useful for ordinary purposes.
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer stopped working once I updated my Win10 to Win10 LTSC. (have enough games that do work, so I will not change again until 2032 or rather until Steam discontinues Win10 support)
Yes but no feature updates, so for example LTSC 2021 is "stuck" on 21H2 from 2021. But it gets the regular security and bugfix updates, last one was June 9th
See here (Enterprise and IoT Enterprise LTSB/LTSC editions):
Technically it can break some apps if they are hard coded to only work with 22H2. Probably happens with some video games and anti cheat software ("always needs the latest update")
There is a Windows 11 LTSC version which works the same.
They receive updates on time. I've been supporting a few LTSC machines for friends and relatives, haven't ever seen them receive any unnecessary junk through Windows Update. Just bug and vulnerability fixes.
They get only security fixes. So if there is some system component that is buggy under some circumstances it stays that way. Part of native windows development is constant workarounds around old buggy dlls
OP says Windows needs builders to make applications and that is what Windows Lite would enable (or expand) but then says Windows Lite shouldn't include .NET one of the primary frameworks to build applications on Windows.
.NET is still installable as a standalone thing. In fact I probably have several versions installed on my current Windows PC. No reason Windows Lite couldn't also have .NET installed _when you need it_.
I still don't know if I am sold with that. .NET is also a runtime so how do you handle the user story? If your users are also on Windows Lite then they have to manage .NET version or you have to package .NET with whatever you build. If your users are on full Windows, wouldn't it just make sense for you to build in same environment as your Users? Especially since IT would have to manage two separate operating systems if devs went Windows Lite and say Sales using the target app was on Windows.
This whole thing makes sense for indie devs or build VMs but breaks down for Enterprise pretty quick, and Microsoft is much more friendly to Enterprise customers than indie devs.
The .NET that comes with Windows is the ridiculously outdated .NET Framework 4.8. But most greenfield projects should have been using the newer .NET (previously .NET Core) for several years now, which is installed separately or deployed as self-contained apps.
The majority of software runs on old outdated .net framework and no one is going to take the time to port it to .net 10 even though it only takes a short time to do so itself, but keep in mind a lot of this isn't the porting it's the testing, release which includes 20 year old enterprise clients who are stingy about change and paying for any updated anything.
I know, and those can keep using Framework 4.8, but the topic here is attracting developers to Windows, and the primary toolchain for that today definitely isn't Framework 4.8, so the top comment is moot.
"OP says Windows needs webdevs to make webpages, but then says Windows Lite internals shouldn't be tightly knit with Internet Explorer, one of the primary means of viewing webpages on windows."
Honestly, I think starting from win32 again would be a breath of fresh air. Also, note that I described it as an option, no one would be forced on Windows Lite. It was my own speculation that it would become popular.
The blog post itself is wishcasting, but it’s missing the point completely once we strip .NET. .NET has been around since I was at least 11, I’m 38 now. I don’t know why it’d be considered optional, the backwards compatibility story disappears without it. Once we want to start fresh from Win32 it’s just not-Windows programmer who vaguely understands Win32 is still available, rather than anything helping anyone.
The blog post sums up why users of Windows might want this.
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.
Yes 100%. All these discussions around Windows always miss the fact that consumers are not Microsoft's core customer, and haven't been for a long time (outside of GameDiv/Xbox).
The fact that consumers use Windows is a nice side effect for keeping mind share and to get people familiar and preferring windows when they enter the workplace. That's it. It's an accidental userbase that exists to be exploited.
Microsoft's money comes from Azure & Office(365). If you're not spending millions on enterprise support/software assurance (or whatever they call it these days) contracts, you pretty much don't exist to them.
I don't believe businesses "need" Microsoft. Microsoft is entrenched in corporations for a variety of reasons and none of them because Microsoft is technically any good.
Microsoft's core product is minimizing operational risk, not the software itself. You can piece together your own stack using best of breed options, but you're going to pay double the price or more, and introduce a ton of friction and risk.
Some businesses (everyone outside of the SV tech echo chamber) "need" Microsoft because its risk mitigation, which is the highest technical feature a business can ask for. Backwards compatibility, EntraID is good, and the compliance/purview stack solves nearly all regulatory headaches OOTB.
OTOH yeah there's a bit of legacy entrenchment, both from Microsoft's monopolistic behavior but also because they were the only ones with an "IT In a box" solution for non-tech companies. Having a cohesive identity, security, and device management ecosystem that can scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints with a few mouse clicks takes a lot of engineering effort that not many others were doing at the time.
I retired a few years ago, but Windows was on every desktop in the environment (close to 5000 installs). They did some software development in house, but the great majority of folks ran some sort of COTS software. Replacing all that would not have been cheap or easy.
They didn't run Windows because they liked Windows, they ran Windows because it was required by the software they needed to run.
Most businesses of any sophistication need specialised software developed only for Windows.
The local car dealership runs factory diagnostic software on Windows.
The two-way radio shop tunes and programs radios using vendor software written for Windows.
Your dentist runs their practice management software runs on Windows, and they Windows software to control other expensive equipment like X-ray machines and 3D scanners.
Those businesses need their software; Windows is an unfortunate side effect. Well those businesses are in a world of hurt as Microsoft forces them to upgrade to Windows 11. e.g., many ATM machines still run on windows XP because the big banks can shoulder any financial loss but small businesses can't. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250516-the-people-stuck...
That's the catch-22 problem. The underlying logic and software rarely care about the platform. They are usually just built Windows because that is the default OS on anything that is not a Mac.
I dunno that it's that easy to administer --- time was, one of the concerns about NeXTstep was that it was so easy to setup/administer and so reliable that there was so little work involved, IT departments had to be downsized --- say rather that administering Windows is in-line w/ current budget projections/expectations.
It is easy to administer. Nothing come close to Active Directory + Group Policy, not even Entra ID + Intune. Windows in the enterprise is just a completely different beast to what you see in the home, or even small businesses.
If it's so easy to administer, why is my work computer a never-ending series of updates and reboots and annoyances such as a printer list which scrolls through several screen worths of clicks before I can find the right printer?
Rolling out the updates to a fleet is the easy administration he’s talking about, which is neither optional nor a trivial task.
Printer administration and Windows printer UX are different too, although the endless-printer-list-oh-god-its-not-even-alphabetical situation is more of an admin oversight to a clunky and low priority situation than anything. Small comfort, no doubt.
The downside of it being so easy is that many talentless hacks got jobs maintaining Windows environments for a living, including in your IT department.
Exactly, we need Windows Lite! Just Win32, media encoders, graphics drivers, CoPilot, and enough to run movie maker and Office, the rest is useless anyway!
Or do you mean no Office support, just everything you need to run Steam?
Or maybe you mean no UI and just the admin interface so you don't need all that bloat when all you need is a server. Except for Powershell and the management interface, of course.
Actually, these days, we don't need applications, Copilot can do all that for us. Just Edge, Bing, and Copilot, the rest is bloat.
There's plenty of unnecessary crap in Windows but everyone who wants Windows Lite wants a different subset to be included in Windows Lite. Just imagine the tech support hell you'd be in when a client installs your software on a machine that doesn't have .NET or H.264 support or libraries for decoding JPEGs or a webview because their kid said they can make the PC less bloated. And you can bet that Windows' remote help support and all of the requirements for third party remote desktop are omitted from anyone's view of "minimal Windows"!
For what it's worth, various stripped-down Windows images exist online. They all use official Windows binaries with signed DLLs and everything so you could theoretically even verify that they're safe. Just don't expect your programs to work on them and be ready to reinstall when a system service inevitably corrupts.
> Exactly, we need Windows Lite! Just Win32, media encoders, graphics drivers, CoPilot, and enough to run movie maker and Office, the rest is useless anyway!
I know you're trying to make a counter point, but nobody wants copilot. Out of everyone I've talked to in the last year, across a broad spectrum of Windows users from sys admins who make me feel like a caveman down to my parents, nobody trusts AI and nobody wants AI in their OS or apps.
An AI free Windows would be an instant hit, but it would fly in the face of everything Microsoft stands for, so for that reason, it'll never happen
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.
It's also kind of pointless. Almost immediately, something will be installed that will require installing the .NET runtime, maybe multiple versions of it.
If the argument is to try to prohibit it, then it just won't work as a platform, because too much existing software won't work on it. There's a lot of garbage I'd love to not have (all the stupid hardware config apps all the manufacturers push on you) but just having that functionality not work can't be the answer.
Similar pet peeve, and I think the solution to this is the platform setting, adopting, and enforcing conventions. Something like what has happened with notebook trackpads[1] about a decade ago, and more recently RGB peripherals[2]—no more cancerous giant Electron app to move a few sliders and set an RGB hex code.
>Almost immediately, something will be installed that will require installing the .NET runtime, maybe multiple versions of it.
That's because Windows ships with an ancient .NET 4.8.1 by default. Purely a mistake on Microsoft's part not to bundle modern .NET with their product and force software packaging hell.
It should be installable, just via a package management system. You choose what you need. I think OP hasn't thought this through completely so he's missing this nuance in his post.
That said, knowing Microsoft they WOULD release something like this but cripple it by doing something stupid like disallowing the use of virtualization technology, even as an installed package.
> It should be installable, just via a package management system
I disagree. .NET is fundamental to the Windows platform. It's like having a Python runtime installed by default in some Linux distros, which makes sense for that distribution's use-case.
Two years ago, I spent time studying the Windows NT kernel internals and ended up writing a comparison against Unix here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design . What I came out of that exercise with is that NT is actually well-made and was very ambitious and advanced at the time it was designed (although free systems have caught up by now).
But what I also came out thinking was: none of that shows. The kernel is great, sure, but all of the crap that has been built on top doesn't let it shine, and that's what people interact with. Take Windows 11 with is dog-slow file manager and the overall feeling that everything is bloated and designed to annoy you. I wish there was a simpler edition... but it ain't gonna happen.
There is already a "Windows Lite", and it's called ReactOS [0].
Except, the last thing we need is for Microsoft to own / embrace-extend-exterminate this. It's best that it's kept as an independent project, enabling developers to target the Windows API if they feel like it, while ensuring that they only target the Wine-compatible parts of it, which then enables their software to also run seamlessly on other platforms at no extra effort, and without requiring either the users or the devs to have to lock themselves into this ungodly telemetry-spying-ads-AI-.NET mess that the article talks about.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has zero to gain from making a Windows Lite variant themselves given their lifeline is exactly this telemetry-spying-ads-AI-.NET ecosystem; and they have zero to gain from absorbing ReactOS or similar projects, other than in order to eliminate them.
I think the author meant something that can be used in practice for real work, not a cyclopean effort of clean room reimplementation of Windows as a hobby for part-time volunteers.
The reality is as you said, only Microsoft can make Windows Lite, and they don’t care to.
Possibly, but that still doesn't mean there isn't a real benefit to developers developing for ReactOS as a proxy for developing for Windows in a manner that makes their products instantly compatible with Mac and Linux.
The "real work" part is mostly about the user. And that depends on available programs on the platform, not on the user's boundless love for telemetry.
OP seems to be mostly addressing developers here, so the point stands.
I don’t think things are quite so dire for Windows. People (including me) have been predicting the end of Windows due to losing mindshare with builders since the turn of the century, and it still hasn’t happened.
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.
> 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.
As a Microsoft sysadmin with a stable of homelab machines of all types and brands (and favorites that are definitely not Microsoft), enterprise mostly buys Microsoft because of the built in endpoint and end user management stacks.
Which is one reason it was great when I migrated to a Mac at work. Because there is less spyware and administrative software slowing down and making my computer buggy!
That just means your IT department isn't putting in the effort. Antivirus, remote management, MitM proxies, software permissions, macOS can do everything Windows can, it just takes three or four subscriptions and double the effort for the IT team.
macOS makes it kind of difficult to do these things, so when companies do deploy the same control they use on Windows, the problem actually becomes worse, because every management tool now needs to rely on hacks rather than officially supported APIs.
None of these things on macOS are difficult. You can mostly treat a Mac like an iPhone and have a pleasant time.
A problem Windows admins often face is that there are lots of knobs to tweak, and because they can tweak a knob in GPO, they (or their bosses) start believing that they automatically should.
Agreed. It’s a mess of confusing configuration spaghetti, my comment was not meant to imply quality (and that’s leaving aside asinine corporate policy). They’re pretty much the only game in town though sadly.
> most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs
And that's why the MacBook Neo exists now. Apple is coming for the lower-end market.
At that point the only thing keeping people on Windows is software lock-in. Which Valve is in the process of working towards dismantling for gaming at least.
With the new Neo prices, they're more coming for the lower-end of the midrange market. The low-end market was half the price the Neo was before the price went up.
Google has gone after the low-end market through ChromeOS and has actually been very succesful at it. Sure, the $200 pieces of crap can't really do anything more than play a video and maybe type into a document at the same time, but that's better than what the Windows alternative offered for many years.
> The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs.
Ever since the MacBook Neo, that's no longer the case. And frankly... Apple has now demonstrated that an old iPhone SoC is enough to drive macOS. I think that it should be feasible for them to run macOS on iDevices as a hypervisor-style guest, yielding you the full macOS experience when plugged into an USB-C dock.
Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has. They are okay for very simple office tasks. If you need something like Intel Core5 level performance though, PCs are still cheaper than equivalent M-series Apple chips. If they have both style users, it is cheaper to get a bulk discount from Lenovo/Dell/HP than splitting your users into camps. It is easier to administer too.
> Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has.
Fair point. But they are also showing people that you can have decent Apple performance at a price point previously reserved for budget Windows laptops.
> It is easier to administer too.
Meh, that's... not as clear as it used to be. Yes, in a full on corporate world based on on-prem AD, GPO and the rest of the MS architecture that might be the case, but even there, IT already has to support Macs because marketing/PR and IT usually demand macOS. And with Windows, it has always been a huge effort to keep up with MS and patchdays randomly breaking stuff. Apple is far more stable.
Yeah, even before Neo, since M1, I've been urging people to buy a Macbook Air if they could afford to.. Or consider buying second hand if new is out of their price range.
Budget Windows hardware is trash and the OS is so full of bloat that within a couple of years a budget Windows laptop will be barely functional. For a long time now arguably the only reason to go Windows is if you're a gamer or a business user with very specific software requirements.
Yes. I use both at home because reasons, and despite the much lower per-computer price tag PCs cost me about twice as much money on an annualized basis because they need to be replaced so much more often.
But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.
Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.
> Over time, Windows Lite becomes the main, and only, version of Windows. Development and maintenance costs fall, and somehow Microsoft makes more money than they ever did on an OS.
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.
Microsoft needs to repeat their Edge trick. Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box. Immense research of running Windows programs on Linux was already done by Wine/Proton teams.
None of the stuff that makes Windows suck compared to Linux is because of the kernel.
Two things I can think off off the top of my head that do completely suck about Windows: the forced updates and forced antivirus (e.g. Defender). None of those depend on the kernel, and Windows userland running on top of Linux wouldn't inherently make those two things suck less.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I am curious as to why you think that? What makes NT a "better kernel for consumers". I have some opinions on that but I don't want to bias your answer.
Some architecture and some implementation details and sometimes purely economic reality:
1. NT is a hybrid kernel. Windows runs many drivers in userspace, if not in a limited kernel environment. This includes network drivers and GPU drivers. It can recover from crashes more gracefully than Linux and BSD kernels. Linux has similar drivers for specific use cases like FUSE, however, they are not as performant as NT.
2. NT has always been designed to drive a GUI-driven OS. So it has better default tunings than a vanilla Linux kernel to operate and stay reactive under memory pressure. When your system is under pressure you'd lose mouse movement on Linux, on NT this is rare. It is not impossible to do this under Linux, however, not many companies (except maybe Android manufacturers and Google/ChromeOS) actually invest in this.
3. NT provides a mostly stable API and ABI for drivers. It is not as strong as Win32 guarantees, however it retained mostly the same driver infrastructure since Vista. Many Win7 or Win8 drivers continue to work under Win11.
4. Bundled drivers for consumer systems in NT are often better quality. This could be the side effect of stable ABI. Unlike Linux, significant refactors changing big parts of the driver APIs are rare. I think this reflects in the quality of drivers like USB Host drivers. I deal with embedded Linux systems (x86, RPi), there is always some "rmmod and modprobe to fix USB" script somewhere in a deployed Linux embedded system. I have never seen anything similar in Windows Kiosk setups (TBH I have seen a lot of reinit of COM drivers but it is often manufacturer's faulty implementation).
5. There is simply more money invested to make consumer drivers work on NT. Linux is often an afterthought for many consumer device manufacturers. There is still not enough buy-in. Mainline Linux kernel team, being inferior marketshare-wise, requests more buy-in and more collaboration from device manufacturers. This works for servers since there is pressure from end customers who want to retain UNIX-like environments. Normal consumers cannot exert the same amount of pressure. Microsoft provides subsystems, APIs and ABIs to write the drivers to OEMs, often consulting the first manufacturers of a certain new device type and making compromises for them. Linux on the other hand, requires competitors to collaborate and create the subsystems and APIs. Competitor players themselves have to agree with the developers of their competitors to create a subsystem. On a capitalist economy competitors do not want to collaborate unless it significantly increases market size for everyone. Consumer electronics have very thin margins. They do not scale well with increased effort required by Linux. Only select few big tech or certain old-school consultancies send the significant system patches.
> There is simply more money invested to make consumer drivers work on NT. Linux is often an afterthought for many consumer device manufacturers. There is still not enough buy-in.
This would not be the case in the hypothetical situation where Windows becomes a Linux distro.
That's the last thing in the list and the looping phase of catch-22. Without providing the other earlier items, it simply doesn't make sense to make Windows a Linux distro. NT is still the better solution. Unless Linux kernel becomes very friendly to closed source drivers and gets better isolation and stable APIs, no consumer company will ever invest in Linux.
Providing a closed-source friendly ecosystem for both the OS and the application layer is what Google did for early Android and that's why it caught on.
The advantages of Win32 and the filesystem structure on top of NT's technical advantages guarantees Microsoft's monopoly will go unchallenged for consumer devices. Linux has to become more like NT, not NT become Linux for success in consumer space. Linux will never become more like NT, so it will never get a stronghold.
The question for Linux (or any kernel / system layer) is very simple: If an OEM can hire developers who will independently play a mediator role under an NDA, creating stable kernel internal APIs that live more than 5 years, making sure the kernel is ready before launch without leaking any hardware specifics, Linux is a viable platform for mass-scale consumer hardware. If not, it isn't. Linux fails on all stages of that.
> Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box
If I had a quid for every time I saw this comment on HN or Reddit I would probably be as wealthy as Gates himself. It is always an instant downvote for me, because they make me lose faith that people on HN have actually understood what a kernel is and how it works, and what ABI compatibility is, and what user-mode stability is. It is dogmatic and pointless.
The NT kernel is pretty good. Windows is generally well-architected. The NT kernel is the best thing about Windows, and you lot want to swap it out with something decidedly inferior.
Windows' user-mode applications and libraries are also pretty good. By user-mode apps and libraries I mean Win32 itself, WinRT, D2D/DirectWrite, D3D, Winsock, Windows Sound, and the thousands of entrypoints and enums for cool Windows stuff like the registry, synchronisation primitives, file management, special user files, cloud files, accessibility and internationalisation, and more. I've mentioned some other nice platform APIs in a sibling comment.
It is pretty easy to write a full-fledged GUI application on and for Windows that handles heavy use of networking, sound, graphics acceleration, etc without ever having to use a single third-party library, and make it run on OSs that are nearly 18 years old (not the case on most competition OSs).
I also daresay that IE/Edge moving to Chromium was in some ways a bad idea, as Chromium has become the de facto default Web platform, and any non-Chromium browser (Safari, Firefox) is likewise de facto non-conforming.
It sounds interesting, and surely there would be some awesome things that would come from it, but on the other hand, MS could use this to take control of linux APIs through their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, so it would not be without risk.
We already have companies like Nvidia and Broadcom shipping binary blobs to support common hardware. Do we really want a corporation like MS getting in on that kind of thing? If MS wrote some really great desktop linux software, it would be hard for the broader linux community to resist being lured into using MS controlled APIs, and handing over part of their control to Linux's most notable rival.
The post doesn't really define the problem this is supposed to solve for "builders". FWIW, Microsoft's official attempt at solving this problem? seems to be "Windows developer configs" -> https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig
which is described as
A WinGet Configuration (DSC) file that sets up a clean, lightweight, distraction-free developer workstation. The goal is a PC state that devs actually love using: no clutter, no noise, just the tools you need.
(...)
* A PC devs actually want to use. Clean Explorer, dark theme, no pop-ups, no recommendations, no widgets. Just your code and your tools. (...)
But there are better declarative tools out there that generate a stripped down installation. Despite it's reputation, Windows 11 is fairly modular for a commercial OS.
I used to have a custom ISO of Windows XP using Barts PE and a bunch of other tools. It would install a fairly stripped version of the OS that ran really well on old hardware. I probably still have it somewhere, but I still ended up on Windows 10 because most of the software I wanted (games, electron apps) wouldn't work on it anymore.
But I genuinely miss having the ability to take the bloat out before you ever install the OS
I like the idea, but I don't really see why this would change the 'Builder' population. Gamers would love it (I have a Windows 10 install around for gaming, I'd take this in a flash, I'd probably not even complain too much about the money), but that isn't the same. To make it work for builders it needs to be an attractive place to do development and I don't see how this really helps with that (other than maybe improving the audience for their products). Although I am speculating there - I haven't written any code on Windows for maybe 15 years now and I don't expect ever to do so again.
YES! I mean a man can dream... I love windows software like "xyplorer", an ideal explorer replacement, "notepad++" for everything text-related and "FSViewer" for displaying all pictures, all portable, all heavily customizable. But personally, I think microsoft is not interested in it's users. It all about control of it's users and making money off them. MS has no intention of changing that. Please, make the switch to linux and own your OS!
Even at $45 I am still not interested. For actually building software, Linux is king. The OS is a commodity, and I largely do not have to think about it.
For desktop use, sure, $45 could fly, but, the main draw of windows is compatibility with existing software, and honestly that is no longer worth it.
how are you supposed to approach this as "for developers" when you're removing one of the main things preinstalled on Windows that developers take advantage of? this post comes off as "someone who doesn't develop for windows coming up with a better windows". this isn't even mentioning all the enterprise stuff and the fact that an extremely large chunk of apps would cease to work. not to mention all of the other layers like GDI+ or gpu accelerated options like Direct2D
Builders and gamers can install regular Windows. They can run a de-crapifying script to strip it right back - cut the AI, OneDrive, adverts etc. It flies along very predictably without that.
So much is optional and easily removed. You don't even have to pay for it any more, never mind $49. For the power users that he's talking about, I don't see the issue.
(I agree the default state for Windows is completely rotten, and it shouldn't be!)
Slightly struck by the term "builders" here. What is this trying to say, that, say, "developers" wouldn't?
("build" does seem to have been settled on as the word for the thing you do when you have the LLM write your code for you, but I'd have thought that "developer" is vague enough to cover both that and also doing it the old-fashioned way?)
It's not obvious if this is a wishlist or endorsement for a product that actually exists. The tone makes it sound like a real product, but if I search for "Windows Lite", I get Windows LTSC, or some downloadable Windows-like software offered by a mix of legit and sketchy looking sites. I am not sure if the author meant the latter.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing. Windows Lite is just win32 with a lightweight shell and graphics drivers.
Not going to happen.
Win32 is stuck in Windows XP, most modern development has been on .NET, even if the core components are implemented in C++, exposed via COM.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing. Windows Lite is just win32 with a lightweight shell and graphics drivers.
tbh the backwards compatibility is not the best and you might have better chance with Wine on Linux but it's still better than MacOS where even software from a couple years ago is unusuable (no 32 bit apps anymore). And will be only worse once Rosetta2 is dropped.
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.
I just bought a new computer because my old one was showing its age. I usualy go right into using Linux, but this time around I decided to let Windows be for a month or two. It took me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to setup Windows with a brand new email (I'm not giving them my old one). Several hours if I count for all the settings I had to hunt down and disable, all the BS I had to remove by hand (I'm not interested in automating this, I don't want instability in my OS that often comes from such scripts). I installed every update, and still yet, last night I still had updates from Microsoft I needed to install.
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.
great post. the only thing that was tying me to Windows at home was gaming. after Proton, that became irrelevant. (maybe it'd be different if I played competitive multiplayer games.)
curious, though--why hasn't your friend updated his Arch distro in 3 years? bleeding edge is one of the benefits vs other distros, IMHO
He's lazy, but also, when the AURs had their little exploits that affected ten thousand+ packages, he was vindicated for not updating all the time. Arch is just insanely stable. I've had no issues with Endeavour which is basically Arch with a better installed and extremely optional tweaks.
The best part is I've been a .NET developer a good chunk of my career, so Microsoft is a company I've always worked with no matter what. If they offered me a Mac at work I would say yes please, since I know I can install .NET on a Mac anyway.
Too late. In my household there are 4 desktops and one laptop. Wiped Windows and installed Debian with KDE Plasma. For our use it's a better "windows" than Windows. Not going back.
> Windows Lite is $49 for a permanent license. No subscriptions.
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.
This is great - and who would then buy the "full fat" Windows? Who wants the product that works, but also with bloatware, spyware, slower, more expensive and taking up more resources?
I mean, sure. OR, we just treat the Win32/Win64 API as the standard ABI for cross-platform stuff (that can't easily be done in the web with WASM) and then use Wine/Proton. Then everything is FOSS and portable and free and doesn't have a bunch of tracking bullshit.
I feel like with gaming this is more or less becoming the reality. Disregarding online gaming [1], a lot of games are being written for "Windows" and being played on Linux. In reality, I think that a lot of newer games are kind of being written with Proton as the target, and the fact that they work on Windows is incidental.
[1] Which I know you can't fully "disregard" but I don't think it kills my point.
Linux and open source have made "selling operating systems" nearly as preposterous as it was back in the mainframe era when they were getting started. So it's gotten very hard to generate revenue directly from Windows. Not even Apple is in the business of selling an OS—they sell hardware, and the OS comes as part of the package. Microsoft has kept good will amongst OEMs by keeping Windows license prices for hardware manufacturers low to nonexistent—were they to actually try making money through the OEM channel by charging a more reasonable price per license, the OEMs would find a way to jump ship to Linux (perhaps ChromeOS). This has already happened during the "netbook era" until Microsoft intervened with Windows 7 Starter Edition.
The pivot for Windows has thus been to find ways for Windows to generate revenue indirectly—by funneling users into other Microsoft products and services, particularly cloud and AI in 2026. But this approach is creating the exact user-hostility problems people are complaining about. Without the ability to generate revenue directly, nor the ability to generate revenue indirectly through cloud services, Windows becomes a cost center rather than a profit center.
So no, I don't see them going the Windows Lite route at all. If they cut out the fat, they cut off Windows's revenue stream and its reason for existing in the first place.
> The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming.
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.
bundling with windows into OEM and big box distributions as a condition of licensed sale, penalizing non bundled sales, does a good job capturing the market.
OEM, retail, and consumers are not choosing the best product, they are hindered from having a choice.
Not trying to offend anyone at all but this is a prescription for the symptom not the disease. M$FT marketing would loooove to create WindowsLite. In fact the did it already back in the day -- and the public fell for it. WindowsME/SE/CE anyone? What utter pieces of garbage.
The real problem is that they still have a moat (the Microsoft tax) on computer manufacturers which keeps their bloatware everywhere. It's one of the more brilliant things Gates pulled off and it's what allowed Ballmer's incompetence to go (almost) unnoticed for years.
The other moat which the author correctly points out is inertia. All of the Microsoft faithful that don't want to learn something new (and I don't blame them -- that's a big letting go and reinvestment).
And Apple could very well fall into the same hide-behind-the-moat behavior. It's what MBAs and beancounters gets you -- something Jobs was able to mostly avoid. But if we're being open-eyed about this, let's not put them on too high of a pedestal.
I'm not at all saying I know where things are going but I do think it involves a Unix philosophy at the core. I think WSL bought Microsoft valuable time but it's embarrassingly obvious that Win32 has just turned to crap and bloat.
The Linux/BSD APIs have their warts too but I'll take those warts any day.
Microsoft needs a “secure” windows lite, and a “secure” azure, and a “secure” token vending service, and a GitHub that is highly available. It has none of these today
Why not DOS? Why not windows 3.1? Well they are too old. win32? Also too old. This is what the .NET complaint is disguising. It's not DOS->3.1->3.11->win32->.NET and so lets just go back one place. It's DOS->3.1->3.11->win32->.NET 1.0->.NET 2.0->.NET 3.0? WPF->.NET 5...->WinUI. Along the way there's COM, DCOM, ActiveX, all sorts of terrible things!
don't forget gdi+, direct2d, and pretty much every other layer built on win32 that are actively used because they're better than directly interfacing via win32
Ever since Win11 I lost all desire to retain Windows. I still have Win10 on my computer on the left side, mostly for testing, but I also decided it will be my last version of Windows anyway. Now, I have been using Linux since many years, so it is not an issue, but Win11 feels as if Microsoft finally declared total war on the user and I can't support that anymore. The telemetry sniffing and spying and now the upcoming age sniffing - sorry, my energy will only go towards opposing Microsoft now. I think it is time for ALL users to stop accepting these corrupt corporate overlords in general and the paid lobbyists that work for them. Mandatory age sniffing is the thing that will break societies here; mandatory AI slop also contributed to this problem.
This article feels like ignorance. The best "Windows Lite" is a Linux distro with VSCode, .NET, PowerShell, etc. There is no hope for improving Windows at this point.
No they don't. Why should they bother?
* Costs them money to make
* Costs them money to maintain
* Will only be used by a TINY subset of ultra-enthusiasts (no, neither HN or Reddit are majorities)
* Every user on it is less telemetry and less advertisement
The reality is that most users don't care, and will just use whatever seems to work fine. Finding out that 'oh yeah, feature/software X does not work on Windows Lite" will inevitably mean that almost everyone stays on mainline.
I don't get why people bother making these wish fulfillment posts regarding Windows. It is what it is, either get used to it or use something else. MS hasn't been listening and they aren't going to start. Your wallet and mine don't make even the tiniest dent in their bottom line.
The sad truth is Microsoft is so heavily invested in and indebted by AI, advertising and telemetry that the only way Windows lite would ever get the greenlight is if the company tanks, loses billions and pivots away from everything they've been pushing for the last decade.
And then maybe we could get the dream that is Windows lite
AI has essentially nothing to do with it. This was standard well before AI took off.
I agree with your reasons but not with "the majority doesn't care". Sure they do. The internet is filled with Windows hate, and Reddit isn't as small as you remember it to be.
The majority has no other option. Linux is too much trouble to learn and Mac requires a new device. What else are you supposed to do?
The majority also wants their stuff to work - the program that solves a problem or the hardware they bought, and all that surface area to support it is how Windows is Windows.
> What else are you supposed to do?
Customize. You can strip out entire features, often called “debloat” but it’s hyper specific. It couldn’t be a general purpose pc after, and a debloated gaming config might lack the support to run other kinds of apps, or vice versa.
They even have a lightly modified version called LTSC although it retains so much feature surface area so as to remain “Windows” it’s not like the article’s idea, but it exists.
Hey, Mac is a huge learning experience too. If your mind is set in the ways of Windows, you are gonna have a bad time when you assume Mac is just as bad (easy example: using clunky Windows workarounds to avoid problems that don't exist on Mac). You almost become oblivious to the straightforward way of doing things because Windows is so fucky. It can be really hard to get an average person used to Windows to find value in Mac, because they don't naturally see the simplification to their workflow, they just expect Mac to work the same way (ie, for their workarounds to function the same way).
Up until OS 26 I'd agree with you but honestly it's not far off from windows other than some small permissions annoyances and the stupid natural scrolling. I got a neo out of desperation to do some audio work and immediately felt at home where I never did on my older Air.
I strongly prefer natural scrolling, though I did grow up with it. I think 26 was a huge mis-step and Apple is going to need to go back on a lot of what they did (which they are starting to do with 27, though they have a long ways to go).
I miss how tight the older versions were. They were technical and got the job done -- the newer designs seem like they're trying too hard to be round and big and friendly. Everything is so spaced out, so much is wasted, information density is pretty much completely gone. It's so sad.
My Intel MBP is still on 10.14.6 because even Catalina was too much for me (removing 32-bit support is kind of a full-reinstall sort of move). But Big Sur looked kinda awful the moment I saw it and Tahoe feels like the Mac is completely losing its identity and principles.
I'm on ASi now and running the latest macOS 27 beta. I don't regret it but I just feel sad, you know?
Don’t know about tiny subset. Every enterprise workstation in the world would probably be running it.
Also the OP specifically fantasizes about unchanged compatibility.
Really there would be no reason not to use this, so it would likely have to be more expensive than the regular spyware/adware version. Thus it couldn’t get away with the name “Lite” and would end up being called “Professional”.
With over 1 billion monthly active users, reddit is not a minority and is a significant fraction of internet users. Btw, people complain about Windows bloat on Whatsapp too. Now, that IS a majority of internet users.
It's a bit of a stretch to assume that every single user on reddit would reinstall Windows for this, or even as much as 5% of them.
Or that they all even run Windows in the first place.
You have to realize that the majority of reddit "users" are either bots (especially now with LLMs making it so easy to generate text on the fly) or utterly braindead. Just last week I got banned and comment deleted from a subreddit calling out someone for deliberately spreading false information. Their comment? Still there.
I have one friend who just loves listening to AI readings of AI-generated drama farming content purporting to be real content from Reddit. It's bizarre.
I also found at least one subreddit for a product which specifically banned posts with the word "scam" in them when I went to make a post about the product being a scam. If that doesn't tell you how much of a scam it actually is, I don't know what does.
Even before the rise of LLMs, everyone knew Reddit was astroturfed to hell and back.
Reddit mods are largely paid shills. Reddit users are zombies. It's worthless to consider the site as a good source of information or sentiment anymore.
No, Reddit users are not braindead or zombies. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet with a varied demographic. They are just normal people.
Bigots can exist without being paid shills...
This is also true, but for what I was calling out, people do pay off mods to supress or promote certain content on the subs they moderate or mods push their own sites or products if they have something to push.
I agree. I seriously doubt making that an option would stop people moving to Apple or Linux especially with MacBook Neo and Steam Machine. Windows has much bigger problem than telemetry and advertisement.
But both of these products would only show damage in the very long run, which also means M$ won't react to it until late.
- people complain but have no choice
- tolerance is too high
- Every sysadmin is quietly annoyed but knows it gives then $$$.
- Companies are never going to change anytime.
They have windows iot. That can easily count as 'windows lite'
Good point, but they don't market it for general consumption, which seems to be the suggestion.
I honestly don't think windows is worth any price. Unix is the platform of builders, and nobody needs a middleman charging them to breathe air (run an os).
LTSC, surprised the post doesn't mention that. No forced feature updates, no unnecessary preinstalled apps. I'm using them for years without any problems. There was only one extreme edge case where an app didn't work because it was hard coded to only work on Windows 10 Pro and couldn't do anything with the LTSC version.
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.
> Yes you can't get it legally as a regular end user
That's why it's not mentioned, it's not a product for "normal users", the audience described in the post.
But that's also kind of the point too: Windows Lite exists but MSFT is "gatkeeping" it to enterprise users only. Probably because they are paying for it.
Not even enterprise customers are allowed to use LTSC. Only hardware OEMs.
It's asinine. They could charge $1000+ for LTSC licenses, but my data and digital sovereignty is apparently worth even more to them.
That's incorrect. Windows LTSC rights are included into Windows Enterprise E3 subscription as well as a VL (EA, MPSA etc.) perpetual license. [1]
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-...
Seconding the correction that LTSC is not restricted to hardware OEMs. I work for a multinational construction materials company and we image LTSC machines day in day out.
Economically, you would probably be the only customer (stated willingness to pay can differ from market outcome ;) paying that amount. Your stated willingness to pay has little relation to the true value of our data and digital sovereignty to Microsoft.
A funny estimate is possible though. MSFT 2750 G$ market cap and 550 M business users. That’s 5 k$ per user. Grossly misrepresenting everything (AI bubble, other cashflows, …) but it is a ‘directionally right’.
Indeed there are much more customers than you could imagine in the non-profit/ government sectors paying for that. There are a lot of compliance regulations regarding to data governance that force them to use a clean and lite LTSC version of Windows.
You can get it legally. Just gotta find a smaller VAR and convince them to sell you a single seat for testing purposes
It's not cheap, but getting it legally is easy, and you don't need a VAR.
Specifically, you can buy a single-seat Microsoft 365 E3 subscription directly from Microsoft for $432/year, which includes a license for a single user to use Windows Enterprise, including LTSC, on up to 5 PCs (along with other stuff, mainly Office).
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/e3
(click "try for free")
I'm using ltsc windows 11 and yes it is much better than one of my other pcs which has pro on it.
However I did use windows 10 ltsc for quite a few years until I hit a dll issue with an old game that turned out to be unresolvable as far as I could tell at the time. So much so I switched to pro (I have a work visual studio subscription so I have access to all versions of windows for free). I can't for the life of me remember what dll or what game it was. But I tend to play older games so probably not something many will hit the same problem.
I wonder if they don’t include all the application compatibility stuff in LTSC. It would be a good way to make the version work for its intended purpose (as part of a larger appliance or industrial tool with purpose built software), while making it much less useful for ordinary purposes.
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer stopped working once I updated my Win10 to Win10 LTSC. (have enough games that do work, so I will not change again until 2032 or rather until Steam discontinues Win10 support)
In the EU, anyone can legally get a second hand LTSC license. See e.g.
https://en.windowsnoticias.com/Where-to-get-cheap-and-offici...
Do these versions get regular updates or are they expected to run on air-gapped machines so nobody really has to take care of them?
Yes but no feature updates, so for example LTSC 2021 is "stuck" on 21H2 from 2021. But it gets the regular security and bugfix updates, last one was June 9th
See here (Enterprise and IoT Enterprise LTSB/LTSC editions):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...
No feature updates sounds like a feature these days. It's why I use a crappy old Debian install too.
Genuine question , what does that mean, stuck on what from 2021? Compared to? Thanks :)
Will never get the final feature update (22H2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history#Ver...
Technically it can break some apps if they are hard coded to only work with 22H2. Probably happens with some video games and anti cheat software ("always needs the latest update")
There is a Windows 11 LTSC version which works the same.
Thanks. Did some googling too and it makes sense just one thing, what does "There is a Windows 11 LTSC version which works the same." Mean?
No bloat, no preinstalled apps, not getting feature updates.
They receive updates on time. I've been supporting a few LTSC machines for friends and relatives, haven't ever seen them receive any unnecessary junk through Windows Update. Just bug and vulnerability fixes.
They get only security fixes. So if there is some system component that is buggy under some circumstances it stays that way. Part of native windows development is constant workarounds around old buggy dlls
There's even Win 11 LTSC although I have yet to test it
Yeah but who gets that legally
Businesses with volume licensing agreements and Kiosk manufacturers can get the licenses pretty easy. Then can even negotiate a lower cost per device.
OP says Windows needs builders to make applications and that is what Windows Lite would enable (or expand) but then says Windows Lite shouldn't include .NET one of the primary frameworks to build applications on Windows.
.NET is still installable as a standalone thing. In fact I probably have several versions installed on my current Windows PC. No reason Windows Lite couldn't also have .NET installed _when you need it_.
I still don't know if I am sold with that. .NET is also a runtime so how do you handle the user story? If your users are also on Windows Lite then they have to manage .NET version or you have to package .NET with whatever you build. If your users are on full Windows, wouldn't it just make sense for you to build in same environment as your Users? Especially since IT would have to manage two separate operating systems if devs went Windows Lite and say Sales using the target app was on Windows.
This whole thing makes sense for indie devs or build VMs but breaks down for Enterprise pretty quick, and Microsoft is much more friendly to Enterprise customers than indie devs.
They already have this problem, Windows includes .NET Framework 4.x but not any modern version of .NET
Right! Everything from word to the calculator app uses .NET these days. Even many games!
If you're talking about the Word in Microsoft Office, I believe it doesn't require .Net. Office add-ins can be built with .Net though.
The .NET that comes with Windows is the ridiculously outdated .NET Framework 4.8. But most greenfield projects should have been using the newer .NET (previously .NET Core) for several years now, which is installed separately or deployed as self-contained apps.
The majority of software runs on old outdated .net framework and no one is going to take the time to port it to .net 10 even though it only takes a short time to do so itself, but keep in mind a lot of this isn't the porting it's the testing, release which includes 20 year old enterprise clients who are stingy about change and paying for any updated anything.
I know, and those can keep using Framework 4.8, but the topic here is attracting developers to Windows, and the primary toolchain for that today definitely isn't Framework 4.8, so the top comment is moot.
How about this analogy then:
"OP says Windows needs webdevs to make webpages, but then says Windows Lite internals shouldn't be tightly knit with Internet Explorer, one of the primary means of viewing webpages on windows."
Honestly, I think starting from win32 again would be a breath of fresh air. Also, note that I described it as an option, no one would be forced on Windows Lite. It was my own speculation that it would become popular.
The blog post itself is wishcasting, but it’s missing the point completely once we strip .NET. .NET has been around since I was at least 11, I’m 38 now. I don’t know why it’d be considered optional, the backwards compatibility story disappears without it. Once we want to start fresh from Win32 it’s just not-Windows programmer who vaguely understands Win32 is still available, rather than anything helping anyone.
And recent installs of 11 already have the old .net framework as an optional feature install.
The blog post sums up why users of Windows might want this.
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.
Yes 100%. All these discussions around Windows always miss the fact that consumers are not Microsoft's core customer, and haven't been for a long time (outside of GameDiv/Xbox).
The fact that consumers use Windows is a nice side effect for keeping mind share and to get people familiar and preferring windows when they enter the workplace. That's it. It's an accidental userbase that exists to be exploited.
Microsoft's money comes from Azure & Office(365). If you're not spending millions on enterprise support/software assurance (or whatever they call it these days) contracts, you pretty much don't exist to them.
One thing you're missing out is their corporate strategy to treat their other products as some form of adspace.
I don't believe businesses "need" Microsoft. Microsoft is entrenched in corporations for a variety of reasons and none of them because Microsoft is technically any good.
It's a little bit of both.
Microsoft's core product is minimizing operational risk, not the software itself. You can piece together your own stack using best of breed options, but you're going to pay double the price or more, and introduce a ton of friction and risk.
Some businesses (everyone outside of the SV tech echo chamber) "need" Microsoft because its risk mitigation, which is the highest technical feature a business can ask for. Backwards compatibility, EntraID is good, and the compliance/purview stack solves nearly all regulatory headaches OOTB.
OTOH yeah there's a bit of legacy entrenchment, both from Microsoft's monopolistic behavior but also because they were the only ones with an "IT In a box" solution for non-tech companies. Having a cohesive identity, security, and device management ecosystem that can scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints with a few mouse clicks takes a lot of engineering effort that not many others were doing at the time.
I retired a few years ago, but Windows was on every desktop in the environment (close to 5000 installs). They did some software development in house, but the great majority of folks ran some sort of COTS software. Replacing all that would not have been cheap or easy.
They didn't run Windows because they liked Windows, they ran Windows because it was required by the software they needed to run.
Most businesses of any sophistication need specialised software developed only for Windows.
The local car dealership runs factory diagnostic software on Windows.
The two-way radio shop tunes and programs radios using vendor software written for Windows.
Your dentist runs their practice management software runs on Windows, and they Windows software to control other expensive equipment like X-ray machines and 3D scanners.
Those businesses need their software; Windows is an unfortunate side effect. Well those businesses are in a world of hurt as Microsoft forces them to upgrade to Windows 11. e.g., many ATM machines still run on windows XP because the big banks can shoulder any financial loss but small businesses can't. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250516-the-people-stuck...
That's the catch-22 problem. The underlying logic and software rarely care about the platform. They are usually just built Windows because that is the default OS on anything that is not a Mac.
I dunno that it's that easy to administer --- time was, one of the concerns about NeXTstep was that it was so easy to setup/administer and so reliable that there was so little work involved, IT departments had to be downsized --- say rather that administering Windows is in-line w/ current budget projections/expectations.
It is easy to administer. Nothing come close to Active Directory + Group Policy, not even Entra ID + Intune. Windows in the enterprise is just a completely different beast to what you see in the home, or even small businesses.
If it's so easy to administer, why is my work computer a never-ending series of updates and reboots and annoyances such as a printer list which scrolls through several screen worths of clicks before I can find the right printer?
Probably because you insist that your computer be on at all times, never save your work, and don't allow it to reboot while you're away.
That, or your IT team sucks. The problem with Windows being so easy is that any idiot can do it, and they often do.
Rolling out the updates to a fleet is the easy administration he’s talking about, which is neither optional nor a trivial task.
Printer administration and Windows printer UX are different too, although the endless-printer-list-oh-god-its-not-even-alphabetical situation is more of an admin oversight to a clunky and low priority situation than anything. Small comfort, no doubt.
The downside of it being so easy is that many talentless hacks got jobs maintaining Windows environments for a living, including in your IT department.
> No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing.
How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s
Exactly, we need Windows Lite! Just Win32, media encoders, graphics drivers, CoPilot, and enough to run movie maker and Office, the rest is useless anyway!
Or do you mean no Office support, just everything you need to run Steam?
Or maybe you mean no UI and just the admin interface so you don't need all that bloat when all you need is a server. Except for Powershell and the management interface, of course.
Actually, these days, we don't need applications, Copilot can do all that for us. Just Edge, Bing, and Copilot, the rest is bloat.
There's plenty of unnecessary crap in Windows but everyone who wants Windows Lite wants a different subset to be included in Windows Lite. Just imagine the tech support hell you'd be in when a client installs your software on a machine that doesn't have .NET or H.264 support or libraries for decoding JPEGs or a webview because their kid said they can make the PC less bloated. And you can bet that Windows' remote help support and all of the requirements for third party remote desktop are omitted from anyone's view of "minimal Windows"!
For what it's worth, various stripped-down Windows images exist online. They all use official Windows binaries with signed DLLs and everything so you could theoretically even verify that they're safe. Just don't expect your programs to work on them and be ready to reinstall when a system service inevitably corrupts.
> Exactly, we need Windows Lite! Just Win32, media encoders, graphics drivers, CoPilot, and enough to run movie maker and Office, the rest is useless anyway!
I know you're trying to make a counter point, but nobody wants copilot. Out of everyone I've talked to in the last year, across a broad spectrum of Windows users from sys admins who make me feel like a caveman down to my parents, nobody trusts AI and nobody wants AI in their OS or apps.
An AI free Windows would be an instant hit, but it would fly in the face of everything Microsoft stands for, so for that reason, it'll never happen
> no .NET
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.
It's also kind of pointless. Almost immediately, something will be installed that will require installing the .NET runtime, maybe multiple versions of it.
If the argument is to try to prohibit it, then it just won't work as a platform, because too much existing software won't work on it. There's a lot of garbage I'd love to not have (all the stupid hardware config apps all the manufacturers push on you) but just having that functionality not work can't be the answer.
> all the stupid hardware config apps
Similar pet peeve, and I think the solution to this is the platform setting, adopting, and enforcing conventions. Something like what has happened with notebook trackpads[1] about a decade ago, and more recently RGB peripherals[2]—no more cancerous giant Electron app to move a few sliders and set an RGB hex code.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/input-precis...
[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/xbox/gdk/docs/features/com...
> no more cancerous giant Electron app to move a few sliders and set an RGB hex code
That will also ship vulnerable drivers.
>Almost immediately, something will be installed that will require installing the .NET runtime, maybe multiple versions of it.
That's because Windows ships with an ancient .NET 4.8.1 by default. Purely a mistake on Microsoft's part not to bundle modern .NET with their product and force software packaging hell.
It should be installable, just via a package management system. You choose what you need. I think OP hasn't thought this through completely so he's missing this nuance in his post.
That said, knowing Microsoft they WOULD release something like this but cripple it by doing something stupid like disallowing the use of virtualization technology, even as an installed package.
> It should be installable, just via a package management system
I disagree. .NET is fundamental to the Windows platform. It's like having a Python runtime installed by default in some Linux distros, which makes sense for that distribution's use-case.
Windows doesn't have any modern version of .NET installed by default though, only old .NET Framework versions
old UWP .NET it's also installed by default... It Appx package system, and it was/is delivered on the store
I think they just mean no .NET by default. Not to stop supporting it altogether, just that those who want it will need to download it.
Two years ago, I spent time studying the Windows NT kernel internals and ended up writing a comparison against Unix here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design . What I came out of that exercise with is that NT is actually well-made and was very ambitious and advanced at the time it was designed (although free systems have caught up by now).
But what I also came out thinking was: none of that shows. The kernel is great, sure, but all of the crap that has been built on top doesn't let it shine, and that's what people interact with. Take Windows 11 with is dog-slow file manager and the overall feeling that everything is bloated and designed to annoy you. I wish there was a simpler edition... but it ain't gonna happen.
It's also interesting to see that after 30 years Windows NT is still a decent OS/kernel. Of course the rest of Windows is just pure garbage.
Without fixing the fundamental business incentives that drove Windows to be the heap of shit that it is today, something like this will never happen
There is already a "Windows Lite", and it's called ReactOS [0].
Except, the last thing we need is for Microsoft to own / embrace-extend-exterminate this. It's best that it's kept as an independent project, enabling developers to target the Windows API if they feel like it, while ensuring that they only target the Wine-compatible parts of it, which then enables their software to also run seamlessly on other platforms at no extra effort, and without requiring either the users or the devs to have to lock themselves into this ungodly telemetry-spying-ads-AI-.NET mess that the article talks about.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has zero to gain from making a Windows Lite variant themselves given their lifeline is exactly this telemetry-spying-ads-AI-.NET ecosystem; and they have zero to gain from absorbing ReactOS or similar projects, other than in order to eliminate them.
[0] https://reactos.org/
I think the author meant something that can be used in practice for real work, not a cyclopean effort of clean room reimplementation of Windows as a hobby for part-time volunteers.
The reality is as you said, only Microsoft can make Windows Lite, and they don’t care to.
Possibly, but that still doesn't mean there isn't a real benefit to developers developing for ReactOS as a proxy for developing for Windows in a manner that makes their products instantly compatible with Mac and Linux.
The "real work" part is mostly about the user. And that depends on available programs on the platform, not on the user's boundless love for telemetry.
OP seems to be mostly addressing developers here, so the point stands.
I don’t think things are quite so dire for Windows. People (including me) have been predicting the end of Windows due to losing mindshare with builders since the turn of the century, and it still hasn’t happened.
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.
> 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.
As a Microsoft sysadmin with a stable of homelab machines of all types and brands (and favorites that are definitely not Microsoft), enterprise mostly buys Microsoft because of the built in endpoint and end user management stacks.
Which is one reason it was great when I migrated to a Mac at work. Because there is less spyware and administrative software slowing down and making my computer buggy!
That just means your IT department isn't putting in the effort. Antivirus, remote management, MitM proxies, software permissions, macOS can do everything Windows can, it just takes three or four subscriptions and double the effort for the IT team.
macOS makes it kind of difficult to do these things, so when companies do deploy the same control they use on Windows, the problem actually becomes worse, because every management tool now needs to rely on hacks rather than officially supported APIs.
None of these things on macOS are difficult. You can mostly treat a Mac like an iPhone and have a pleasant time.
A problem Windows admins often face is that there are lots of knobs to tweak, and because they can tweak a knob in GPO, they (or their bosses) start believing that they automatically should.
> That just means your IT department isn't putting in the effort.
Lazy IT departments are a blessing!
Agreed. It’s a mess of confusing configuration spaghetti, my comment was not meant to imply quality (and that’s leaving aside asinine corporate policy). They’re pretty much the only game in town though sadly.
> most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs
And that's why the MacBook Neo exists now. Apple is coming for the lower-end market.
At that point the only thing keeping people on Windows is software lock-in. Which Valve is in the process of working towards dismantling for gaming at least.
With the new Neo prices, they're more coming for the lower-end of the midrange market. The low-end market was half the price the Neo was before the price went up.
Google has gone after the low-end market through ChromeOS and has actually been very succesful at it. Sure, the $200 pieces of crap can't really do anything more than play a video and maybe type into a document at the same time, but that's better than what the Windows alternative offered for many years.
Consumers and businesses pick Windows because it’s difficult to buy a PC that doesn’t have Windows installed. At least in part.
The other important factor is that the share of PCs in general is a fraction of Android and iOS devices.
> The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs.
Ever since the MacBook Neo, that's no longer the case. And frankly... Apple has now demonstrated that an old iPhone SoC is enough to drive macOS. I think that it should be feasible for them to run macOS on iDevices as a hypervisor-style guest, yielding you the full macOS experience when plugged into an USB-C dock.
Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has. They are okay for very simple office tasks. If you need something like Intel Core5 level performance though, PCs are still cheaper than equivalent M-series Apple chips. If they have both style users, it is cheaper to get a bulk discount from Lenovo/Dell/HP than splitting your users into camps. It is easier to administer too.
> Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has.
Fair point. But they are also showing people that you can have decent Apple performance at a price point previously reserved for budget Windows laptops.
> It is easier to administer too.
Meh, that's... not as clear as it used to be. Yes, in a full on corporate world based on on-prem AD, GPO and the rest of the MS architecture that might be the case, but even there, IT already has to support Macs because marketing/PR and IT usually demand macOS. And with Windows, it has always been a huge effort to keep up with MS and patchdays randomly breaking stuff. Apple is far more stable.
Yeah, even before Neo, since M1, I've been urging people to buy a Macbook Air if they could afford to.. Or consider buying second hand if new is out of their price range.
Budget Windows hardware is trash and the OS is so full of bloat that within a couple of years a budget Windows laptop will be barely functional. For a long time now arguably the only reason to go Windows is if you're a gamer or a business user with very specific software requirements.
Yes. I use both at home because reasons, and despite the much lower per-computer price tag PCs cost me about twice as much money on an annualized basis because they need to be replaced so much more often.
But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.
Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.
> Over time, Windows Lite becomes the main, and only, version of Windows. Development and maintenance costs fall, and somehow Microsoft makes more money than they ever did on an OS.
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.
Microsoft needs to repeat their Edge trick. Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box. Immense research of running Windows programs on Linux was already done by Wine/Proton teams.
None of the stuff that makes Windows suck compared to Linux is because of the kernel.
Two things I can think off off the top of my head that do completely suck about Windows: the forced updates and forced antivirus (e.g. Defender). None of those depend on the kernel, and Windows userland running on top of Linux wouldn't inherently make those two things suck less.
NT is a better kernel for consumer systems compared to Linux unlike first generation Edge which was a worse browser compared to Chrome.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I am curious as to why you think that? What makes NT a "better kernel for consumers". I have some opinions on that but I don't want to bias your answer.
Some architecture and some implementation details and sometimes purely economic reality:
1. NT is a hybrid kernel. Windows runs many drivers in userspace, if not in a limited kernel environment. This includes network drivers and GPU drivers. It can recover from crashes more gracefully than Linux and BSD kernels. Linux has similar drivers for specific use cases like FUSE, however, they are not as performant as NT.
2. NT has always been designed to drive a GUI-driven OS. So it has better default tunings than a vanilla Linux kernel to operate and stay reactive under memory pressure. When your system is under pressure you'd lose mouse movement on Linux, on NT this is rare. It is not impossible to do this under Linux, however, not many companies (except maybe Android manufacturers and Google/ChromeOS) actually invest in this.
3. NT provides a mostly stable API and ABI for drivers. It is not as strong as Win32 guarantees, however it retained mostly the same driver infrastructure since Vista. Many Win7 or Win8 drivers continue to work under Win11.
4. Bundled drivers for consumer systems in NT are often better quality. This could be the side effect of stable ABI. Unlike Linux, significant refactors changing big parts of the driver APIs are rare. I think this reflects in the quality of drivers like USB Host drivers. I deal with embedded Linux systems (x86, RPi), there is always some "rmmod and modprobe to fix USB" script somewhere in a deployed Linux embedded system. I have never seen anything similar in Windows Kiosk setups (TBH I have seen a lot of reinit of COM drivers but it is often manufacturer's faulty implementation).
5. There is simply more money invested to make consumer drivers work on NT. Linux is often an afterthought for many consumer device manufacturers. There is still not enough buy-in. Mainline Linux kernel team, being inferior marketshare-wise, requests more buy-in and more collaboration from device manufacturers. This works for servers since there is pressure from end customers who want to retain UNIX-like environments. Normal consumers cannot exert the same amount of pressure. Microsoft provides subsystems, APIs and ABIs to write the drivers to OEMs, often consulting the first manufacturers of a certain new device type and making compromises for them. Linux on the other hand, requires competitors to collaborate and create the subsystems and APIs. Competitor players themselves have to agree with the developers of their competitors to create a subsystem. On a capitalist economy competitors do not want to collaborate unless it significantly increases market size for everyone. Consumer electronics have very thin margins. They do not scale well with increased effort required by Linux. Only select few big tech or certain old-school consultancies send the significant system patches.
> There is simply more money invested to make consumer drivers work on NT. Linux is often an afterthought for many consumer device manufacturers. There is still not enough buy-in.
This would not be the case in the hypothetical situation where Windows becomes a Linux distro.
That's the last thing in the list and the looping phase of catch-22. Without providing the other earlier items, it simply doesn't make sense to make Windows a Linux distro. NT is still the better solution. Unless Linux kernel becomes very friendly to closed source drivers and gets better isolation and stable APIs, no consumer company will ever invest in Linux.
Providing a closed-source friendly ecosystem for both the OS and the application layer is what Google did for early Android and that's why it caught on.
The advantages of Win32 and the filesystem structure on top of NT's technical advantages guarantees Microsoft's monopoly will go unchallenged for consumer devices. Linux has to become more like NT, not NT become Linux for success in consumer space. Linux will never become more like NT, so it will never get a stronghold.
The question for Linux (or any kernel / system layer) is very simple: If an OEM can hire developers who will independently play a mediator role under an NDA, creating stable kernel internal APIs that live more than 5 years, making sure the kernel is ready before launch without leaking any hardware specifics, Linux is a viable platform for mass-scale consumer hardware. If not, it isn't. Linux fails on all stages of that.
> Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box
If I had a quid for every time I saw this comment on HN or Reddit I would probably be as wealthy as Gates himself. It is always an instant downvote for me, because they make me lose faith that people on HN have actually understood what a kernel is and how it works, and what ABI compatibility is, and what user-mode stability is. It is dogmatic and pointless.
The NT kernel is pretty good. Windows is generally well-architected. The NT kernel is the best thing about Windows, and you lot want to swap it out with something decidedly inferior.
Windows' user-mode applications and libraries are also pretty good. By user-mode apps and libraries I mean Win32 itself, WinRT, D2D/DirectWrite, D3D, Winsock, Windows Sound, and the thousands of entrypoints and enums for cool Windows stuff like the registry, synchronisation primitives, file management, special user files, cloud files, accessibility and internationalisation, and more. I've mentioned some other nice platform APIs in a sibling comment.
It is pretty easy to write a full-fledged GUI application on and for Windows that handles heavy use of networking, sound, graphics acceleration, etc without ever having to use a single third-party library, and make it run on OSs that are nearly 18 years old (not the case on most competition OSs).
I also daresay that IE/Edge moving to Chromium was in some ways a bad idea, as Chromium has become the de facto default Web platform, and any non-Chromium browser (Safari, Firefox) is likewise de facto non-conforming.
It sounds interesting, and surely there would be some awesome things that would come from it, but on the other hand, MS could use this to take control of linux APIs through their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, so it would not be without risk.
Just look at what happened last week with linux distros needing to update their secure boot keys with a new MS signed certificate. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/expiration-secure-boot-signin...
And look at what MS did with their old version of Office for Mac, where they decided not to simply renew a certificate that would keep the software functioning. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/yo...
We already have companies like Nvidia and Broadcom shipping binary blobs to support common hardware. Do we really want a corporation like MS getting in on that kind of thing? If MS wrote some really great desktop linux software, it would be hard for the broader linux community to resist being lured into using MS controlled APIs, and handing over part of their control to Linux's most notable rival.
The problem is Microsoft, not windows
The post doesn't really define the problem this is supposed to solve for "builders". FWIW, Microsoft's official attempt at solving this problem? seems to be "Windows developer configs" -> https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig
which is described as
A WinGet Configuration (DSC) file that sets up a clean, lightweight, distraction-free developer workstation. The goal is a PC state that devs actually love using: no clutter, no noise, just the tools you need. (...)
* A PC devs actually want to use. Clean Explorer, dark theme, no pop-ups, no recommendations, no widgets. Just your code and your tools. (...)
This is essentially what the IoT Enterprise LTSC edition is.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
Aside from that, there are various tools and deployment files to automate a stripped down Windows 11 installation.
I don't really use Windows except on my gaming PC, but I like winutil:
https://github.com/christitustech/winutil
But there are better declarative tools out there that generate a stripped down installation. Despite it's reputation, Windows 11 is fairly modular for a commercial OS.
I used to have a custom ISO of Windows XP using Barts PE and a bunch of other tools. It would install a fairly stripped version of the OS that ran really well on old hardware. I probably still have it somewhere, but I still ended up on Windows 10 because most of the software I wanted (games, electron apps) wouldn't work on it anymore.
But I genuinely miss having the ability to take the bloat out before you ever install the OS
But does anyone actually need a Windows?
At this point only a few people because of some software.
I like the idea, but I don't really see why this would change the 'Builder' population. Gamers would love it (I have a Windows 10 install around for gaming, I'd take this in a flash, I'd probably not even complain too much about the money), but that isn't the same. To make it work for builders it needs to be an attractive place to do development and I don't see how this really helps with that (other than maybe improving the audience for their products). Although I am speculating there - I haven't written any code on Windows for maybe 15 years now and I don't expect ever to do so again.
YES! I mean a man can dream... I love windows software like "xyplorer", an ideal explorer replacement, "notepad++" for everything text-related and "FSViewer" for displaying all pictures, all portable, all heavily customizable. But personally, I think microsoft is not interested in it's users. It all about control of it's users and making money off them. MS has no intention of changing that. Please, make the switch to linux and own your OS!
Even at $45 I am still not interested. For actually building software, Linux is king. The OS is a commodity, and I largely do not have to think about it.
For desktop use, sure, $45 could fly, but, the main draw of windows is compatibility with existing software, and honestly that is no longer worth it.
how are you supposed to approach this as "for developers" when you're removing one of the main things preinstalled on Windows that developers take advantage of? this post comes off as "someone who doesn't develop for windows coming up with a better windows". this isn't even mentioning all the enterprise stuff and the fact that an extremely large chunk of apps would cease to work. not to mention all of the other layers like GDI+ or gpu accelerated options like Direct2D
Builders and gamers can install regular Windows. They can run a de-crapifying script to strip it right back - cut the AI, OneDrive, adverts etc. It flies along very predictably without that.
So much is optional and easily removed. You don't even have to pay for it any more, never mind $49. For the power users that he's talking about, I don't see the issue.
(I agree the default state for Windows is completely rotten, and it shouldn't be!)
Slightly struck by the term "builders" here. What is this trying to say, that, say, "developers" wouldn't?
("build" does seem to have been settled on as the word for the thing you do when you have the LLM write your code for you, but I'd have thought that "developer" is vague enough to cover both that and also doing it the old-fashioned way?)
It's not obvious if this is a wishlist or endorsement for a product that actually exists. The tone makes it sound like a real product, but if I search for "Windows Lite", I get Windows LTSC, or some downloadable Windows-like software offered by a mix of legit and sketchy looking sites. I am not sure if the author meant the latter.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing. Windows Lite is just win32 with a lightweight shell and graphics drivers.
Not going to happen.
Win32 is stuck in Windows XP, most modern development has been on .NET, even if the core components are implemented in C++, exposed via COM.
PowerShell is all about .NET and COM interop.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing. Windows Lite is just win32 with a lightweight shell and graphics drivers.
So, basically Linux with Wine/Proton?
Isn’t this basically what SteamOS does?
Last time I tried, a lot of CAD/CAE packages still won't operate under WINE, at least not out of the box.
Windows problems are major tech debt and an architecture that is just not working anymore
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
>Windows problems are major tech debt
tbh the backwards compatibility is not the best and you might have better chance with Wine on Linux but it's still better than MacOS where even software from a couple years ago is unusuable (no 32 bit apps anymore). And will be only worse once Rosetta2 is dropped.
> ”No .net, nothing”
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.
Windows actually needs to be laid to rest forever. Win32 may live on as a legacy/stable API (via WINE) on superior free and open platforms.
I just bought a new computer because my old one was showing its age. I usualy go right into using Linux, but this time around I decided to let Windows be for a month or two. It took me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to setup Windows with a brand new email (I'm not giving them my old one). Several hours if I count for all the settings I had to hunt down and disable, all the BS I had to remove by hand (I'm not interested in automating this, I don't want instability in my OS that often comes from such scripts). I installed every update, and still yet, last night I still had updates from Microsoft I needed to install.
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.
great post. the only thing that was tying me to Windows at home was gaming. after Proton, that became irrelevant. (maybe it'd be different if I played competitive multiplayer games.)
curious, though--why hasn't your friend updated his Arch distro in 3 years? bleeding edge is one of the benefits vs other distros, IMHO
He's lazy, but also, when the AURs had their little exploits that affected ten thousand+ packages, he was vindicated for not updating all the time. Arch is just insanely stable. I've had no issues with Endeavour which is basically Arch with a better installed and extremely optional tweaks.
The best part is I've been a .NET developer a good chunk of my career, so Microsoft is a company I've always worked with no matter what. If they offered me a Mac at work I would say yes please, since I know I can install .NET on a Mac anyway.
So no juicy 'telemetry' data for profiling, recurring revenue service tie-ins, advertizing revenue deals nor hefty 'store' margins?
Somehow I don't see this happening.
What is this ?
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.
We already have it. It's called LTSC
Or maybe we'll get a new more stripped down version of the "software engineer" deployment mode they released recently
> Without Builders, you don't have software, and without software, you don't have users. This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.
> Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry,
Exactly. They already have telemetry, so in theory they know what they are doing (?)
W11 IoT https://massgrave.dev
It's hard to justify to pay for an operating system, when Linux and Mac OS is for free.
I wouldn't call MacOS 'free' given it has very strict requirements for proprietary hardware.
Free in a sense that I don't have to pay extra for it (comes with the machine) and no extra fee for new versions either.
Windows comes with machines too. Just because it comes with an Apple computer does not mean you aren't paying for it. You certainly are paying for it.
That sounds like Windows Premium, not Lite. The annoying parts are the "features" that modern MS added intentionally
Too late. In my household there are 4 desktops and one laptop. Wiped Windows and installed Debian with KDE Plasma. For our use it's a better "windows" than Windows. Not going back.
Windows Server Core exists.
Yet it costs like 20x of regular Windows license while supporting almost none of the applications.
ReactOS is already some sort of Windows Lite. And now with coding agents we can accelerate development on it.
> Windows Lite is $49 for a permanent license. No subscriptions.
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.
In a roundabout way, this exists – it’s called Windows RE.
omitting .net will cost you a big base of builders. just my 2 cents.
I would be happier to see windows die. Gaming is already getting better on linux and content creation needs a push.
No, more SKUs is not the answer.
user experience doesn't matter, where's the shareholder value?
This is great - and who would then buy the "full fat" Windows? Who wants the product that works, but also with bloatware, spyware, slower, more expensive and taking up more resources?
Charging for Windows Lite? Lawsuit in 3...2...1...
I mean, sure. OR, we just treat the Win32/Win64 API as the standard ABI for cross-platform stuff (that can't easily be done in the web with WASM) and then use Wine/Proton. Then everything is FOSS and portable and free and doesn't have a bunch of tracking bullshit.
I feel like with gaming this is more or less becoming the reality. Disregarding online gaming [1], a lot of games are being written for "Windows" and being played on Linux. In reality, I think that a lot of newer games are kind of being written with Proton as the target, and the fact that they work on Windows is incidental.
[1] Which I know you can't fully "disregard" but I don't think it kills my point.
Microsoft is in a pickle.
Linux and open source have made "selling operating systems" nearly as preposterous as it was back in the mainframe era when they were getting started. So it's gotten very hard to generate revenue directly from Windows. Not even Apple is in the business of selling an OS—they sell hardware, and the OS comes as part of the package. Microsoft has kept good will amongst OEMs by keeping Windows license prices for hardware manufacturers low to nonexistent—were they to actually try making money through the OEM channel by charging a more reasonable price per license, the OEMs would find a way to jump ship to Linux (perhaps ChromeOS). This has already happened during the "netbook era" until Microsoft intervened with Windows 7 Starter Edition.
The pivot for Windows has thus been to find ways for Windows to generate revenue indirectly—by funneling users into other Microsoft products and services, particularly cloud and AI in 2026. But this approach is creating the exact user-hostility problems people are complaining about. Without the ability to generate revenue directly, nor the ability to generate revenue indirectly through cloud services, Windows becomes a cost center rather than a profit center.
So no, I don't see them going the Windows Lite route at all. If they cut out the fat, they cut off Windows's revenue stream and its reason for existing in the first place.
Windows has become a problem and users can never get rid of it.
Already addressed in my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675898
> The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming.
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.
bundling with windows into OEM and big box distributions as a condition of licensed sale, penalizing non bundled sales, does a good job capturing the market.
OEM, retail, and consumers are not choosing the best product, they are hindered from having a choice.
Not trying to offend anyone at all but this is a prescription for the symptom not the disease. M$FT marketing would loooove to create WindowsLite. In fact the did it already back in the day -- and the public fell for it. WindowsME/SE/CE anyone? What utter pieces of garbage. The real problem is that they still have a moat (the Microsoft tax) on computer manufacturers which keeps their bloatware everywhere. It's one of the more brilliant things Gates pulled off and it's what allowed Ballmer's incompetence to go (almost) unnoticed for years. The other moat which the author correctly points out is inertia. All of the Microsoft faithful that don't want to learn something new (and I don't blame them -- that's a big letting go and reinvestment). And Apple could very well fall into the same hide-behind-the-moat behavior. It's what MBAs and beancounters gets you -- something Jobs was able to mostly avoid. But if we're being open-eyed about this, let's not put them on too high of a pedestal. I'm not at all saying I know where things are going but I do think it involves a Unix philosophy at the core. I think WSL bought Microsoft valuable time but it's embarrassingly obvious that Win32 has just turned to crap and bloat. The Linux/BSD APIs have their warts too but I'll take those warts any day.
it would also be really nice to have arm and x64.
Charging for Windows Lite? Microsoft Lawsuit in 3...2...1...
windows 10 ltsc. zero issues so far
Nice dream; the world is a bit more complicated than that.
The politics is too powerful it will never truly happen.
There WILL be something slightly lighter with the ability to move the taskbar.
Microsoft needs a “secure” windows lite, and a “secure” azure, and a “secure” token vending service, and a GitHub that is highly available. It has none of these today
You probably can't make the math work at $49 because of the endless sustaining engineering that would need to be done for this.
How would this help any of the in-fighting MS teams get ahead next quarter?
Microslop should unshittify, but that will never happen.
>Windows Lite is $49 for a permanent license. No subscriptions.
Lol, I wouldn't use it if they paid me to do it.
> no .NET
> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.
What? All modern Windows software requires .NET
Why not DOS? Why not windows 3.1? Well they are too old. win32? Also too old. This is what the .NET complaint is disguising. It's not DOS->3.1->3.11->win32->.NET and so lets just go back one place. It's DOS->3.1->3.11->win32->.NET 1.0->.NET 2.0->.NET 3.0? WPF->.NET 5...->WinUI. Along the way there's COM, DCOM, ActiveX, all sorts of terrible things!
don't forget gdi+, direct2d, and pretty much every other layer built on win32 that are actively used because they're better than directly interfacing via win32
Ever since Win11 I lost all desire to retain Windows. I still have Win10 on my computer on the left side, mostly for testing, but I also decided it will be my last version of Windows anyway. Now, I have been using Linux since many years, so it is not an issue, but Win11 feels as if Microsoft finally declared total war on the user and I can't support that anymore. The telemetry sniffing and spying and now the upcoming age sniffing - sorry, my energy will only go towards opposing Microsoft now. I think it is time for ALL users to stop accepting these corrupt corporate overlords in general and the paid lobbyists that work for them. Mandatory age sniffing is the thing that will break societies here; mandatory AI slop also contributed to this problem.
already did. called it xp. just fix that. done. you're welcome.
Terribly written. Also, no, we don't need more Microslop.
I'd love a currently supported, slop-free Windows XP or 7, hell even 10.
This article feels like ignorance. The best "Windows Lite" is a Linux distro with VSCode, .NET, PowerShell, etc. There is no hope for improving Windows at this point.
> This article feels like ignorance.
Wow. Let's see what an informed opinion looks like.
> The best "Windows Lite" is a Linux distro with VSCode, .NET, PowerShell, etc.
Oh.... ok then.