Posted by pbohun 3 hours ago
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.
Two things I can think off off the top of my head that do completely suck about Windows: the forced updates and forced antivirus (e.g. Defender). None of those depend on the kernel, and Windows userland running on top of Linux wouldn't inherently make those two things suck less.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There WILL be something slightly lighter with the ability to move the taskbar.