True. The point where it becomes unsafe for most users is when browsers stop providing updates.

Support for Windows 10 extends well into 2025. Like with XP and 7 which also had really wide adoption, I could easily see them extending that timeline even further. If history repeats, the lifespan of 10 and 11 could end up being similar (much like XP and Vista, as well as 7 and 8/8.1). You may not miss out on much by missing 11.

While it is frustrating that they might cut off perfectly good hardware in 2025, their support timelines for hardware and software are still far better than Apple or Google.

Junking hardware for no good reason is an industry wide problem. Without effective regulation, there will always be a push to make old stuff obsolete and drive new sales. Microsoft has been the least-bad of their peers thanks to corporate customers who pressure them into long support timelines. However, the PC manufacturers are major customers too, and they lean on Microsoft to drive new PC sales on the consumer side.

Not likely. They've tried this so many times, and it never sees wide adoption. Windows RT, initial iterations of Windows on ARM, S-Mode. They all lack the ability to run regular Windows applications outside of store apps, and therefore end up being rejected by most of the user base. They can re-brand or repackage it as many times as they like, but the result will always be the same.

In the case of the few systems that actually ship with S-Mode, there is a quick way to disable it, usually at zero cost. So they're clearly well aware that they can't force it on people.

They may keep trying to push it, but they know better than to force it.

What they are pushing real hard is Microsoft accounts. It is to the point that the OS lies to you about the need for them, and you have to lie to the OS in order to avoid them.

One thing that really didn't help them was having to fight off a huge lawsuit from a US patent troll. The fact that they were a Canadian company probably did not help them in the US court system.

While they were distracted by fighting in court, American companies like Apple and Google were busy innovating and taking away their market share from them.

I wonder when the next Canadian tech giant is due to rise and fall, following in the shoes of Nortel and Blackberry?

So is the MIT license somehow bad? Is it preferrable to use Java where Oracle is activelly suing over it, or to use the product that has been around for decades and never led to a similar lawsuit? I wouldn't blindly trust either company, but from a risk management perspective the evidence points to one being far safer to deal with on that front.

I'm no Microsoft fanboy. For a lot of people who work in the .NET space, they can be the most frustrating part of the ecosystem. They seem to have trouble picking a direction and sticking with it, making it difficult to adopt whatever shiny new thing they're pushing. At least now that it is all open source, chances are someone will keep it going even if they drop the ball. Plus there is a lot of great 3rd party stuff for .NET now, so you're not stuck with following their latest fads. MS would do well to adopt more of these existing third party libraries themselves, rather than reinventing the wheel.

My thinking about Microsoft is not stuck in 1999 like yours is. There exists a middle ground between seeing them as pure evil and being a zealous MS fanboy. The evidence about how Nadella's Microsoft operates is out there in place sight. Unless you have blinders on, you'll see both the good and the bad. They're also large enough that they sometimes pull in opposite directions, depending which team or manager is making the call.

And yes I've used Mono. I used it on Linux PLCs (before .NET Core came around), and have occasionally used code from Mono to solve issues in .NET Framework apps. Since Microsoft's purchase of Xamarin, Mono CLR became an important part of the .NET stack on certain platforms. Mono used to be dog slow, but it made huge performance gains in later releases. The downside of Microsoft's Xamarin purchase is that MS only contributes to the parts of Mono that are useful to them, and has left the rest to rot. MonoDevelop's repository got hijacked to morhp it into a commerical product for Mac, and Mono's cross platform System.Drawing and WinForms implementations are purpsefully sidelined. Anything Linux Desktop is de-emphasised. You're better off going 3rd party if you want Linux Desktop for .NET (Avalonia, Uno, Eto.Forms). Arguably your'e better off going 3rd party for anything UI related, since MS can't pick a direction there.

Since when was MIT a scary license? Virtually everything in the .NET ecosystem is MIT licensed nowadays. Using a standard and permissive license is better than creating a new one like Oracle has done (and like MS used to do all the time).

C# has operator overloading, but I've yet to see code use it in a confusing way. Most projects don't use it at all. It is a non-issue in practice.

It isn't 1999 anymore. Microsoft as a company have changed substantially when it comes to open source. That said, they still make some frustrating decisions. They aren't always the best open source citizens, despite the efforts of some MS insiders who are slowly moving them in the right direction. However, Oracle's behaviour around Java makes Microsoft look like a saint in comparison. Nobody has done more to discourage people from using Java than Oracle themselves have. You only need to read through this thread to see that.

Java has good enterprise frameworks, no doubt. It had a head start and got firmly entrenched in that space. Java doesn't get the same love or benefit from the same momentum as some other languages do, but it'll remain entrenched in enterprise for a long time. There isn't really a compelling reason to switch when Java does the job well.

It is just too bad that you need to shill with inaccurate and outdated info about C# just to pump up Java. Java can hold its own based on its merits. It doesn't reqiire jealots to push misinformation about its competitors.

What major platform is the CLR missing on? There are implementations for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and Tizen. They support x86/x64/arm32/arm64 architectures. Amazon offers official support for their cloud, and obviously Azure and .NET are well integrated.

That might make Solaris/SPARC the largest platform that they're missing. Aside from that, Java really only has an advantage in legacy spaces like Symbian, or in niche areas like scripting on Blu-Ray players.

In my view, Java has a bit of an edge in enterpise spaces, mostly due to its entrenchment. For general purpose computing, C# now has an edge, especially with Google trying to move Android development away from Java.

C# and .NET is MIT and fully cross platform, and has surpassed Java in far too many ways to be considered just a poor copy. Nowadays you're more likely to see complaints that they've added too much to the C# language rather than concerns about anything being missing.

I don't blame anyone for being surprised that something that originated at MS became one of the most portable langauges out there. I certainly wouldn't have seen that coming when .NET started out. However, that is what ultimately happened.

You're about a decade in the past if you think C# is still a Windows-only closed source ecosystem. If you want to come off as an expert, you need to keep up with the times.

You can go to the repositories for C# and .NET on Github and see that everything is MIT licensed. You don't need to take the word of any "fanboy".

Microsoft has provided written assurances that protect the community from patent claims. While not everyone is convinced these promises offer complete legal protection, thus far Microsoft has abided by their promises regarding their patents. Contrast that with Oracle who already used Java patents to sue competitors.

While MS does drive developers to their proprietary IDE and tooling, and occasionally makes crappy decisions with the open source projects they steward, there is no denying that .NET and C# are real open source projects. If MS ever got too out of line, MIT licensing allows for a fork. In fact, well before MS made everything open source, there was a thriving cross platform fork with Mono. It did well enough independant of Microsoft that parts of it were incorporated into Microsoft's open source .NET Core rewrite. The ability to use C# for mobile apps started thanks to the open source community rather than MS.

I used to feel the same way. Before Windows 2000, you had the option of NT4 which didn't have support most Win32 software, or Win95/98 which were unstable single user consumer operating systems. Win ME was just a bad continuation of Win 98. Windows 2000 on the other hand brought the full Win32 desktop environment to the NT system. For power users, it was definitely the best Windows of its era.

It took until XP before Microsoft fully merged its two OS streams, but it also came with the default "fisher price" theme and started the trend of moving all the control panel stuff for no reason, so a lot of people still liked Windows 2000.

The Achilles heel of Windows 2000 was atrocious security. It was built to be a workstation OS on a corporate network. It had a huge attack surface once attached to the internet. MS was still pretty new to the internet security game at that point, and it showed. It is likely the most insecure OS they ever released.

I recently re-watched the Star Trek TNG episode "The Inner Light". I went into it expecting to enjoy a classic episode, but in light of what is happening to our own planet, the story of their dying planet felt a lot more on the mark than it ever had in the past.

Still a great episode, but recent events have added an eerie extra layer to it.

Now they just need to support the old Chromebooks. It'd sure be nice to get this for an old out of support ARM Chromebook.

Saying that .NET hasn't been bought into by many developers is just bizarre.

It wasn't Microsoft that ported their Calculator. They just open sourced it. It was the Uno Platform folks who ported it as a demo of how they can run UWP/WinUI apps on any platform.

What the Uno folks are doing is pretty interesting for C# developers. They took a UI framework that was designed to be specific to Windows and used it to target more platforms than the frameworks that were designed to be cross-platform (Avalonia, Maui/Xamarin Forms, Eto, GTK, etc). A small Canadian company got there ahead of the Microsoft project that is trying to do the same thing. Of course they're building on a ton of MS open source stuff to do it, but it is still impressive.

Might as well reuse the category since there won't be many stories about Sun Microsystems nowadays.