Microsoft is losing Builders fast. They’re switching to MacOS and Linux. The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming. However, even these are falling to Linux.
Without Builders, you don’t have software, and without software, you don’t have users. This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.
.NET is just a runtime, not problematic at all, and definitely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ads, spyware, and AI.
It’s probably Microsofts best product
Probably Microsoft’s best stupidest name too, except maybe renaming the remote desktop app to “Windows App”.
I hate that rename so much, it makes it impossible to search anything about it. Another fun fact is the process name for “Windows App” is Windows365.exe 🤦
But it’s so sloooowwww
Compares to what? Electron apps or ffmpeg level of assembler?
Native?!
Native what? AoT compiled dotnet code? Bad C++ code?
I suppose bad C++ code if those are the only options?
Of course not. But saying an entire framework is bad is silly. That is my entire point. Thanks for agreeing with me.
Maybe have a look at https://michaelscodingspot.com/csharp-performance-vs-c/
no its not.
It’s only slow if you’re running a slow computer. Anyway it’s way faster than all your electron apps which each insist on taking up four for gigabytes of RAM
Yep. Plenty of games depends on it too.
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.
Don’t forget about excel.
Its so nice C# can run in Linux :).
At work, we joke that MS will eventually get tired of the OS game and just throw Windows tools on top of Linux and call it. Then just become a SaaS provider for everything else. Not WSL like legit linux kernel with Windows.
There are also lots of games that use .NET.
To quote Steve Ballmer; “DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS […] DEVELOPERS. YES!”.
No .NET 😂 what’s still running after that?
Microsoft needs to die.
Windows losing noticeable numbers of users is a huge net gain for society. Hopefully it continues, regardless of Microslop’s actions.
the fact that you list .net shows you dont have the knowledge to make this claim
What’s wrong with .NET?
Nothing, bias from the .NET Framework days probably
I don’t really know what it is, but I do know that a whole bunch of stuff doesn’t work if you don’t have it installed. That and Java.
It’s just a framework for some code (usually that written in C#) to run on. It’s not a windows only thing either. Just that on Linux if it’s required it’ll just get installed via the package manager, so you won’t see the usual GUI installer that is often packaged with some games (even though you might already have it installed).
It used to be VB.net and other such stuff. It WAS pretty terrible. Ive had to pick apart some pretty horrendous applications. Then Mono/C# popped up and a lot of community effort went into making everything better. It helps that .net stole a LOT of functionality from Rails/Django/etc… and make it much easier for devs to do actual work on it.
The problem is when we talk about .net it could be a huge combo of tech from the last 10+ years. The newest iteration is fine. Its fast at least with C#.
Everything from .NET Core onwards has been a blast to work with in my opinion. And it got even better when .NET 8 came out and I’ve genuinely been excited for every major release since.
So a Microsoft product got good after it became open source?
Yep, it’s arguably the best thing they’ve done and still currently do I’m actually surprised the core .NET team haven’t been corrupted yet. I always find it funny that all of the bigger guys that show off the new features and improvements in their preview showcases never use windows.
Sadly the Visual Studio and VS Code team seem to have been corrupted though because 95% of all new features for those always seem to be centered around AI. I use Rider personally now, and Im looking forward to eventually moving over to that for work at some point too.
I personally like C# and NOT .net…but im a weirdo.
I’m curious, how do you go about using C# without .NET?
10 years ago I would have said maybe. Now? Practicly everything that you run on Windows will run, in some form or another, on Linux. Even the hard to crack gaming is now becoming a non issue. There really is no point in Windows any longer.
Microsoft is now offering Azure Linux.
It’s easier to just use Linux.
You need to abandon windows. You know their goals. You know they can’t be trusted. Stop giving them chances to get it right and fuck you.
I’m a 30-year ex-Windows developer - started with C/C++ briefly, moved to Java for a few years, and then to C#/.NET for about 23 years. Good riddance to Microsoft Windows. The keyboard shortcuts may be forever ingrained into my reflexes, but I’d rather use Linux or MacOS.
No concerns about .NET however. It’s a cross-platform development framework and works well. It’s also quite fast now.
Modern. Net is portable and fast, yes. But .NET framework is (mostly) not portable and it’s tied to the version of Windows is on. We’ll see when Microsoft decides to EOL it but so far it has not been announced. It’s not getting more than security updates now, as far as I know.
We’re converting everything we can (mostly web apps) to modern .Net (formerly core) so it can run on Linux. I may be stuck on Windows at work for the office apps, but my code runs on Linux.
.NET Framework specifically - yeah. That’s on life support. .NET Core is likely to be around for a long time. I spent the last few years at my former employer working on transitioning our server-side business layer components to .NET Core so they could run in Linux containers. Someone else got to deal with the Kubernetes aspect - thank goodness.
Now I usually avoid thinking about any of that. (Oops.)
Good call. I’m getting mired in the k8s side right now and we have dozens of small web apps that need upgraded and a couple beefier framework apps that need essentially rewritten. Unfortunately I can’t escape lol.
We an ecosystem I overall like .net core and I agree it will stick around. I just can’t wait to get off IIS and into Linux even if that means complicating things with kubernetes.
.NET Core is likely to be around for a long time.
You wish.
I spent the last few years at my former employer working on transitioning our server-side business layer components to .NET Core so they could run in Linux containers. Someone else got to deal with the Kubernetes aspect - thank goodness.
Why bother? Just to keep paying MS?
What do you have to pay Microsoft for when using .NET?
Why bother? Just to keep paying MS?
Scalability was the primary reason. An application running on physical Windows-based servers can’t quickly scale up and down, leading to higher hosting costs due to everything scaled to maximum capacity at all times. Or, more often, leading to slow performance and lost revenue due to the customer not wanting to pay for maximum hosting capacity at all times. So the customers want scalable cloud hosting. And when losing a customer often means a loss of millions of dollars in revenue for my former employer, they want to keep those customers.
A secondary goal is increasing the speed of deployment for new customers. Scripting the entire environment - including servers, network, storage - can make it very fast to spin up a new customer or testing environment. That can be done without .NET, of course, but .NET Core is the obvious next step for a large distributed enterprise product suite that is (was) already running on .NET Framework.
.NET Core isn’t a primary platform for desktop or mobile client applications. It is very common as a hosting platform; that is likely to continue.
when Microsoft decides to EOL
Will never happen. The freaking VB6 runtime is still supported in Win11, and there’s a mountain of .NET Framework code still out there.
Framework 4.8 still gets regular security updates, and will for years to come.
Yeah I’m not holding my breath. It will be around for a long time.
A couple of things I could see changing that would be a) Microsoft in financial trouble, b) AI both making it harder to keep up with security bugs, and making it easier to migrate away from legacy systems.
The chances of .net framework being among the first to go is slim though.
Good luck with that. Linux is what you are looking for and it’s here already.
windows lite
So you mean Linux? No telemetry? No ads? No AI? No .net? Also just works? Also free? Also free as in beer?
Yeah, people need Linux
.net is also on linux in some capacity. See the *arr stack as an example.
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.
