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Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

philipbohun.com

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Re: Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

#71

Post by a2128 »

> Over time, Windows Lite becomes the main, and only, version of Windows. Development and maintenance costs fall, and somehow Microsoft makes more money than they ever did on an OS.

Looking from the outside, it doesn't seem that Microsoft treats Windows as an isolated product anymore with a balance sheet of sales versus development costs. Rather, it's an advertising billboard for their other money-making products like Edge, Copilot, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and at some point Candy Crush of all things(?). In fact this isn't isolated to just Windows or Microsoft either. SwiftKey pushes you to use OneDrive, Google (search engine) famously pushed Google products and there were antitrust discussions about that. Advertising was just some annoying thing that was necessary to power free web services but now it's infiltrated the very core of our day-to-day technology. Until we can get proper antitrust enforcement, we'll only see technological stagnation get worse as more products become boring billboard monopolies with little incentives to get better.

Re: Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

#75

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #22

Microsoft needs to repeat their Edge trick. Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box. Immense research of running Windows programs on Linux was already done by Wine/Proton teams.

> Migrate Windows to the Linux kernel and get Linux compartibility out of the box

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.

Re: Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

#76

Post by mschuster91 »

okanat wrote: post #59
mschuster91 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. 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.

Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has. They are okay for very simple office tasks. If you need something like Intel Core5 level performance though, PCs are still cheaper than equivalent M-series Apple chips. If they have both style users, it is cheaper to get a bulk discount from Lenovo/Dell/HP than splitting your users into camps. It is easier to administer too.

> Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has.

Fair point. But they are also showing people that you can have decent Apple performance at a price point previously reserved for budget Windows laptops.

> It is easier to administer too.

Meh, that's... not as clear as it used to be. Yes, in a full on corporate world based on on-prem AD, GPO and the rest of the MS architecture that might be the case, but even there, IT already has to support Macs because marketing/PR and IT usually demand macOS. And with Windows, it has always been a huge effort to keep up with MS and patchdays randomly breaking stuff. Apple is far more stable.

Re: Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

#77

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #28
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #9

> no .NET 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.

It's also kind of pointless. Almost immediately, something will be installed that will require installing the .NET runtime, maybe multiple versions of it. 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 havi…

> all the stupid hardware config apps

Similar pet peeve, and I think the solution to this is the platform setting, adopting, and enforcing conventions. Something like what has happened with notebook trackpads[1] about a decade ago, and more recently RGB peripherals[2]—no more cancerous giant Electron app to move a few sliders and set an RGB hex code.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/input-precis...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/xbox/gdk/docs/features/com...

Re: Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

#78

Post by hbn »

bunderbunder wrote: post #34

I don’t think things are quite so dire for Windows. People (including me) have been predicting the end of Windows due to losing mindshare with builders since the turn of the century, and it still hasn’t happened. 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…

> most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs

And that's why the MacBook Neo exists now. Apple is coming for the lower-end market.

At that point the only thing keeping people on Windows is software lock-in. Which Valve is in the process of working towards dismantling for gaming at least.

Re: Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

#79

Post by bunderbunder »

kypro wrote: post #53
mschuster91 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. 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.

Yeah, even before Neo, since M1, I've been urging people to buy a Macbook Air if they could afford to.. Or consider buying second hand if new is out of their price range. 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…

Yes. I use both at home because reasons, and despite the much lower per-computer price tag PCs cost me about twice as much money on an annualized basis because they need to be replaced so much more often.

But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.

Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.

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