> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
