Microsoft Needs Windows Lite
philipbohun.com64 points by pbohun 3 hours ago
64 points by pbohun 3 hours ago
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.
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...
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.
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.
Right! Everything from word to the calculator app uses .NET these days. Even many games!
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.
One thing you're missing out is their corporate strategy to treat their other products as some form of adspace.
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.
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.
> 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
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
> 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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ”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.
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.
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.
NT is a better kernel for consumer systems compared to Linux unlike first generation Edge which was a worse browser compared to Chrome.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
The politics is too powerful it will never truly happen.
There WILL be something slightly lighter with the ability to move the taskbar.
I would be happier to see windows die. Gaming is already getting better on linux and content creation needs a push.
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.
No, more SKUs is not the answer.
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.
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
Charging for Windows Lite? Microsoft Lawsuit in 3...2...1...
Charging for Windows Lite? Lawsuit in 3...2...1...
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.
it would also be really nice to have arm and x64.
Nice dream; the world is a bit more complicated than that.
You probably can't make the math work at $49 because of the endless sustaining engineering that would need to be done for this.
r/WindowsLTSC/wikiHow would this help any of the in-fighting MS teams get ahead next quarter?
>Windows Lite is $49 for a permanent license. No subscriptions.
Lol, I wouldn't use it if they paid me to do it.
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.
> no .NET
> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.
What? All modern Windows software requires .NET
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.