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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers.
What? All modern Windows software requires .NET
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.
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's why it's not mentioned, it's not a product for "normal users", the audience described in the post.
OEM, retail, and consumers are not choosing the best product, they are hindered from having a choice.
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.
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.
This whole thing makes sense for indie devs or build VMs but breaks down for Enterprise pretty quick, and Microsoft is much more friendly to Enterprise customers than indie devs.
See here (Enterprise and IoT Enterprise LTSB/LTSC editions):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...
I disagree. .NET is fundamental to the Windows platform. It's like having a Python runtime installed by default in some Linux distros, which makes sense for that distribution's use-case.
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...
How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s
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.
It's asinine. They could charge $1000+ for LTSC licenses, but my data and digital sovereignty is apparently worth even more to them.
Microsoft's core product is minimizing operational risk, not the software itself. You can piece together your own stack using best of breed options, but you're going to pay double the price or more, and introduce a ton of friction and risk.
Some businesses (everyone outside of the SV tech echo chamber) "need" Microsoft because its risk mitigation, which is the highest technical feature a business can ask for. Backwards compatibility, EntraID is good, and the compliance/purview stack solves nearly all regulatory headaches OOTB.
OTOH yeah there's a bit of legacy entrenchment, both from Microsoft's monopolistic behavior but also because they were the only ones with an "IT In a box" solution for non-tech companies. Having a cohesive identity, security, and device management ecosystem that can scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints with a few mouse clicks takes a lot of engineering effort that not many others were doing at the time.
Technically it can break some apps if they are hard coded to only work with 22H2. Probably happens with some video games and anti cheat software ("always needs the latest update")
There is a Windows 11 LTSC version which works the same.
They didn't run Windows because they liked Windows, they ran Windows because it was required by the software they needed to run.
2026-06-29
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.
Windows Lite is a stripped down version of Windows. No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing. Windows Lite is just win32 with a lightweight shell and graphics drivers. Maintenance/security patches happen monthly (if there are any), and the user can decide to apply them automatically or manually.
Windows Lite is perfect for gamers and developers. It's a stable backwards-compatible target. Win32 is a bit clunky, but because it's stable devs build lightweight wrappers around it to give it a good API. Windows Lite makes Windows a platform that people want to build for again.
Because gamers and developers love Windows Lite, ordinary users decide to move to it too. Universities, companies, and governments all buy licenses for Windows Lite.
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.
Windows Lite is $49 for a permanent license. No subscriptions.