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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.
What? All modern Windows software requires .NET
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.
r/WindowsLTSC/wikiThe 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.
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.
Lol, I wouldn't use it if they paid me to do it.
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.
Rotundo•58m ago
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.
WillAdams•27m ago
rawgabbit•26m ago
thewebguyd•9m ago
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.
theandrewbailey•8m ago
How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s