‘Windows 10 Lite’ Is Coming (But Don’t Get Too Excited)

There’s certainly a market out there for a lightweight version of Windows 10; long have the masses complained about the increasingly bloated size of the OS over the years. And, while a “Lite” SKU has recently been spotted in the wild, it’s not the skim-flavoured thing we’d like it to be. Rather, it’s aimed at Chromebooks, going from reports.

Tero Alhonen dug into some of the configuration files in a recent Windows 10 update, and noticed an interesting addition:

The momentary excitement of a lean Windows 10 were quickly diffused however, when it was revealed by Brad Sams, writing for Petri, that this SKU is aimed at Chromebooks, not the enthusiast:

It’s currently called Lite, based on documentation found in the latest build, and I can confirm that this version of the OS is targeting Chromebooks. In fact, there are markings all over the latest release of the insider builds and SDK that help us understand where this OS is headed.

Sams goes on to explain that this Lite build would designed to run “[Progressive Web Apps] and UWP apps and [strip] out everything else”. It’s also unlikely it’ll be released for public consumption:

This is not a version of the OS that will run in the enterprise or even small business environments and I don’t think you will be able to ‘buy’ the OS either; OEM only may be the way forward.

Oh well. Maybe, one day, Windows will morph into something more akin to what Linux is today — in the distribution sense, where you can pick and choose what components to install. I know it sounds like insanity (and it probably is), but there’s some hope, given the work Microsoft has done getting Windows 10 onto ARM, and Linux onto Windows.

What a strange world we live in.

@teroalhonen [Twitter, via Petri]

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