QuickyWhy is Windows still bloated
https://piefed.social/c/nostupidquestions/p/1902128/why-is-windows-still-bloated
The goal of msft isn’t to be and efficient steward of your resources, or better enable the user, or to create a platform for game/app developers in hopes of creating a more attractive ecosystem for you.
It’s nothing like any of those things.
The goal of Microsoft is to maximize shareholder returns, and the best way to do that is to abuse their dominant market position while monetizing every aspect of their platform that most people will buy anyway.
I’m not sure how this fits in to the question to be honest.
I don’t doubt the greed, but I don’t see how that pertains to legacy code bloat.
The point is that they have no financial incentive to clean up or prevent bloat, so they don’t.
Linux doesn’t either, but the Linux community operates on principles and passion instead of financial incentives, and so thusly is not similarly bloated.
Ah right, yeah the bloat I’m asking about isn’t so much about all the shit applications they bundle in, but the stuff that remains to maintain compatibility with obscure or legacy hardware/applications.
The financial incentive would be long term user retention, combined with a simplified codebase and performance improvements.
The legacy compatibility is very important for microsoft’s enterprise customers, many of whom are still using some legacy software for aging machinery. A lot of big businesses are slow to move away from legacy software because it always incurs cost. Often they will tell microsoft and other companies they buy products from that compatibility is essential. They won’t invest thousands or millions of dollars to upgrade their aging infrastructure simply on microsoft’s insistence with their new product.
Wouldn’t the aging hardware running that legacy software not be upgradable to the latest Windows versions due to modern hardware requirements anyway?
This is true and might be an argument that windows 11 is actually is moving away from its archaic foundations, slowly. But hardware isnt always a limitation. Companies will refresh laptops and workstations with better hardware yet still require use of legacy software. Its a tug of war between a companies financial spending, want for the latest tech in other areas of the company, tolerance to security vulnerabilities, etc. If microsoft tells them that they cannot use their essential legacy software on windows 11, and drop support for their older versions because of their oen financial review, then they risk losing their largest customers.
I do think the legacy bloat is more to do with its foundations in software, being based on windows NT, moreso than legacy hardware. And with hardware improving, software gets faster for free just by running with more overhead. Its led to an inefficiency boom which you can see with games becoming less optimized because it doesnt need to be. Same could be applied to window’s with respect to new hardware.
Captain PoofterNo because it is old software running on new hardware. Modern Windows comes with a ton if code so “old stuff” still works, it even favors bundling runtime cold for OLD frameworks rather than new in the installation. That’s why you need to install modern. NET 10 etc after a new windows installation when installing new softeare, yet it runs old software out of the box. Companies aren’t running dinosaur code on old computers, they’re running dinosaur code on modern computers.
If i remember right, Microsoft said they’re dropping support for a lot of the old .NET stuff at least, so we’ll see if it happens and if companies get mad or update themselves finally