I'm building a gaming PC that's gonna run Linux. To prep, I install my distro of choice (CachyOS) on an old laptop to check it out. It was fantastic. I'm confident saying, unless there's a very specific outlier reason, you don't need Windows anymore.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Lots of games, especially indy games, rely on .NET, like Stardew Valley, and Terraria.
fuck, they need that to retain business customers.
It's becoming ridiculous how much lost time there is at work because of Microsoft bullshit. Teams doesn't work, OneDrive doesn't sync, Outlook won't find anything for you, all of the office programs are becoming more difficult to use and slower...
I've got a team of about a dozen people and we probably lose an entire person's work day every single week just to Microsoft bullshit. not even regular issues, just straight up bullshit that shouldn't happen.
if I weren't so busy, I'd be looking into switching my team to Linux. but at some point it's going to get bad enough and I'm going to be low enough on work (lol okay not likely) that I'll be able to properly investigate a transition. Microsoft is the weak point of pretty much every process at our company.
except for excel. that's still doing okay. not great, but okay.
If you think its bullshit that shouldnt be happening open a bug report. Its more than likely a skill issue because office is pretty simple to manage
I fill out a good number of reports. I can't always be bothered to do it, and they probably don't read them anyways because of the swearing
it's not my job to do QA on their shitty products
and our IT support doesn't know what causes some issues or how to resolve them either, so it's not likely a user skill issue.
if you're not coming across issues with Microsoft products, it's more than likely that you're simply not actually using them
The only real issues I come across are issues with their new features like intune stuff on mac. The core stuff all work pretty reliably with little to no maintenance and have great documentation. The only complaints I ever see/hear for teams, onedrive and 365 apps are users being dumb or caused by device issues. There are of course microsoft outages (often) but they fix themselves most of the time.
I'm a 30-year ex-Windows developer - started with C/C++ briefly, moved to Java for a few years, and then to C#/.NET for about 23 years. Good riddance to Microsoft Windows. The keyboard shortcuts may be forever ingrained into my reflexes, but I'd rather use Linux or MacOS.
No concerns about .NET however. It's a cross-platform development framework and works well. It's also quite fast now.
.NET is just a runtime, not problematic at all, and definitely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ads, spyware, and AI.
Yep. Plenty of games depends on it too.
It's probably Microsofts best product
But it's so sloooowwww
You have been able to make custom installs of Windows that remove all these things since at least Windows 98. Though without .NET, a ton of shit will stop working as it's a library of functions/runtime environments.
The author of the blog is living in dreamland. Microsoft will never release Windows Lite because, to management, Windows is a conduit for AI and subscriptions.
Linux is the answer.
Realistically, who would even buy Windows Lite? What advantage would it have over regular Windows AND Linux systems?
shear
"sheer", here.
The closest thing is LTSC, but Linux is easier to deal with imo
I'll go one further and say IOT *Enterprise LTSC
But here's the big problem: stripping all of the terrible shit out of Windows doesn't make it better than Linux, it just makes it less bad than Windows is today.
For anyone running anticheat games Windows is the only option. Windows being utter shit might one day get them to give up these games just so they could ditch Windows. Which I'd welcome, but Microsoft probably doesn't.
Some anticheat games, yeah.
The vast majority of games, including most multiplayer games (and many with anticheat) work just fine on Linux today thanks to Proton, and even MacOSX is starting to catch up with GameHub.
For the few games that don't work right now, I can easily imagine someone filling the gap with a Windows dual boot partition (or even just a PS5).
I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Linux is closer to being what we need it to be today than Windows is. Windows has a lot of work to do, and even then it'll never be quite as open or computer geek-friendly as Linux. I don't see a good path forward for Windows, especially as casual users more deeper and deeper into mobile ecosystems.
Or the other way around. As soon as enough people switch, game devs will follow.
If you want Windows Lite then you might as well commit to Linux.
Plenty of YouTube videos on tons of different distros for anyone to find their starter distro that's similar to Windows.
Micro$lop wants to become what IBM was. They want corporate money and subscriptions. They hate users anyway.
to little, not late. Been a avid windows user since `95, used all of them up to 11 no exception, pivoted 3 years ago to linux, and at this point there is literally not a thing that will bring me back. Linux is 1000x better for me, free of charge, more polished, faster, better looking, no BS, and if there IS any bs, i can move to another distro that i like. There is literally not a single thing. Those kernel level anti cheat games... fuck em, i got 1000's of games to play that work on steam and gog and uplay and battle.net and all other platforms flawlessly no problem and been waiting to play em.
Microsoft is not going to remove .NET to attract software developers when they want developers to use .NET. Not having access to software that uses .NET probably wouldn't be a good trade off for how little removing it from Windows would do to make Windows lighter.
.NET is arguably one of the better things to come out of Microsoft. The CLR only runs when a .NET application is running so it’s not bloat, and it’s pretty lightweight as far as a VM goes with JIT. It’s well documented, has public standards, is cross platform, and released under MIT.
I’m a Unix/Linux greybeard so I’ve no real skin in the game. But given how C# has become the defacto cross platform game development language of choice for both Godot and Unity engines, .NET deserves a little credit.
C#/.NET is easily the best thing Microsoft makes.
I realize the bar is pretty low.
There are also lots of games that use .NET.
To quote Steve Ballmer; "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS [...] DEVELOPERS. YES!".
Lol, Microsoft will never give up on telemetry and spying
Good luck with that. Linux is what you are looking for and it's here already.
There's no money to get or data to sell from that though, so it's not gonna happen.
Tbf their main userbase comes from it being preinstalled.
Imagine if highschools spent one day in tech classes teaching how to install a new OS instead of microsoft word for the 640th time.
Removing .NET wouldn't be a good idea tho.
And Microsoft doesn't care much for gamers on desktops, they'll mostly cater to the Xbox players that runs a basically slimmed down and locked version of Windows.
Not really. Windows can shoot people's dogs and people would still use it, look for "disable targeting feature debloat" or something.
they really don't though, especially developers. doing dev work on NixOS for example is like night and day compared to everything else. I can't imagine now not getting work done without NixOS. flakes and stuff just make every build so incredibly easy and because of which no matter where I put the thing I know it's going to work.
Even gaming, outside of a few games, works flawlessly. Hell even pirating now works fairly well. Emulation too. I can pick which cores I want via my gaming nix module and it's all good to go. it's great.
I don't think I would trust it.
Microsoft will continue on inertia for years. but it's basically a walking corpse full of parasites at this point.
Can a parasite get infected by parasites?
There's something sad about that text. Feels like someone so addicted to a failing corporate product, that can't even imagine life without it, and will beg for a better version and continuity of the monopoly, instead finding an alternative and moving on with life
Unfortunately, a fair chunk of my convenience comes from the .NET runtime, but sure, removing the rest would be welcome. I highly doubt they'd bother to do this, though, because so many businesses with higher-tolerance older CEOs are fine with remaining on Windows...
No, nothing other than completely open sourcing the system can save it
It's called TempleOS.
Microsoft is like a burning high-rise that will occasionally put out the fire in one section, and start another in another section. And there’s billions of people in there.
There are other high-rises, which very rarely catch fire at all, and you’ve tried to tell people to get out and go into the other ones but they don’t.
You’ve watched the microsoft fire burn for almost 30 years. Or more. You’re just astounded how not only are there still people in there, but they still refuse to leave. Just - dealing with the smoke and flames all day every day. It’s madness.
But how will they achieve exponential growth if they don't keep putting more stuff into all their products