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.

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

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.

That's why it's not mentioned, it's not a product for "normal users", the audience described in the post.

See here (Enterprise and IoT Enterprise LTSB/LTSC editions):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...

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.

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.

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.

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.

How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The other important factor is that the share of PCs in general is a fraction of Android and iOS devices.

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.

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.

So, basically Linux with Wine/Proton?

Isn’t this basically what SteamOS does?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lol, I wouldn't use it if they paid me to do it.

     r/WindowsLTSC/wiki

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.

OEM, retail, and consumers are not choosing the best product, they are hindered from having a choice.

> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.

What? All modern Windows software requires .NET