Microsoft Validation OS | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Validation OS

docs.microsoft.com

167 pointsmaxbaines133 comments

Looking at the EULA, it contains

software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft.

...and judging from the other comment here, it appears to be nothing more than a kernel and a command prompt, yet the download is nearly 340MB. Did they strip out everything else, but still leave the spyware in?

Judging by https://msfn.org/board/topic/183672-windows-11-validation-os..., there's the GUI and a number of its subsystems in there.

If you haven't seen the Windows version of "command line only", it's kinda funny: https://youtu.be/wUTW7Z9p6tY?t=347

Makes some amount of sense to do it this way, since that probably means you get things like adjusting the font size or launching accessibility tools bundled in with the graphical frontend + conhost instance. Otherwise that stuff would have to be reimplemented for a 'true console only' mode

There's a handful of literal GUIs that load too, for instance, setting the date and time or using task manager. There's some literal GUI screens present... just not many.

Note that there is an even more stripped down version of Windows Server without all of these GUI elements: Nano Server! It has no local logon capability at all. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/...

I love that there are now versions of Windows without windows.

If you don't want to implement a console (that is fair) you can just use the console provided by the BIOS (the VGA console, as DOS did back in the days) or nowadays UEFI (as for example GRUB or even Linux if you don't load a graphics driver does). BIOS/UEFI have the primitives necessary to read/write to the console so you can just use them.

A text-only console is useful in a lot of situations, for example when the graphics driver doesn't work or crashes (in that situations in Windows you have to reboot or start in recovery mode, while on Linux you can open a text console and with the CLI fix the issue or restart the graphics server). It would also be useful to boot computers without a GPU, by exposing the text console trough a serial port, another thing that you can do in Linux, most embedded devices, such as routers, doesn't have any GPU but a serial port used for the console access (of course only for recovery and debugging, since otherwise you connect trough SSH).

By the way the question is not only for hardware that doesn't have the GPU, but also for containers/VM. If you drop the requirement of a GPU it would be far easier and lightweight to virtualize Windows, since you don't have to virtualize any graphics hardware at all but only the CPU. The text console would be provided by the virtualization program itself.

> exposing the text console trough a serial port, another thing that you can do in Linux,

NT-based OSes can do that since 3.51, IIRC

Edit: for the kernel debug, so not quite the the same thing.

Windows hasn’t had a text mode since Windows 2000. And even before that, the Windows NT text mode only served the purpose of bringing up a system before the graphics drivers were available, and was accordingly bare-bones and mostly unsupported. The GUI is an intrinsic part of the OS, baked into the kernel and core system libraries, not something bolted onto it like on most other operating systems you’re used to. I know it’s hard for *nix people to fully understand, because you think of the command line as the “real” interface to Linux, but on Windows, the real interface is the GUI.

Pre-OSX MacOS was also GUI only, and didn’t even come with any command line interface at all.

Windows NT (at least up to 7, but probably all versions) does have a text console that serves basically the same purpose as in Unix systems. It's where stuff printed with NtDisplayString goes. See Autochk (boot-time disk check) and other native NT applications which used it (e.g. boot-time defragmenters).

Also up to XP the setup disk contained a "recovery console" that also used the native NT console, and ran something very close to cmd (if not cmd itself?). It's really just probably due to some fancy compatibility reason that they decided to enable the GUI even when you'd only need the NT console.

More recent versions of Windows also contain the recovery console. I've certainly used it a few times in Win10 & Win8 (had to "fix" my partition tables on a clean Win10 install from Win8). It's not a full-screen terminal like you'd expect if you were "booting to a CLI". It's a windowed terminal sans explorer.exe. It's decently buried in the recovery options, but it's there.

About the same as the command prompt on the setup media.

Where you can run NOTEPAD.EXE and it pops up with the mouse support and you can edit and copy files as text, plus have a bit of GUI browsing in the file system while you are at it.

Actually, on most other operating systems since the adoption of Xerox's ideas, the GUI is part of the OS, unless we are talking about UNIX as you well put it, and the few surviving mainframes/micro-computers.

Might be interesting to investigate what telemetry would or could be sent, but I’m assuming it’s just their usual feedback smileys that find their way into Microsoft’s beta UIs, and are presumably sent to an unmonitored ticketing system.

poorly monitored -- the vote up/down is typically used in internal performance metrics and when it dips too low, then someone analyses the feedback to see where they can improve the scores.

Some teams stay way more on top of the metric than others.

Is the EULA specific to this software or a generic boilerplate one MS uses everywhere?

As far as I know, Microsoft is the only big company I know that uses a gigantic, generic, combined EULA for all of its services at once.

> it appears to be nothing more than a kernel and a command prompt, yet the download is nearly 340MB

That's honestly not that bad for a base system. FWIW, Arch's minimal install is ~600mb, and that's with a kernel + coreutils + drivers + userland utilities. This must be a really minimal tool.

Alpine Linux is even smaller as a minimalist system, and then there are things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31977164

You can definitely get smaller from there, I was using an example of another common desktop operating system for reference though

ridiculous.

I would expect it to have some extra functionality not usually baked into the kernel to be extra careful (and note) when a device works, but not quite obeys the protocols it should. Microsoft used to have "checked builds" (IIRC) that validated API call parameters. It was slower, but it would slap your hand instead of crashing when you asked it to do something stupid.

Also, if it's a hardware validation tool, I'd expect it to be able to collect and send all sorts of telemetry back to Microsoft. They are also interested in whether the device you are validating works correctly.

I remember having NT3.51 and NT4.0 checked build CDs from MSDN.

I think they also came with full symbol definitions, it was an absolute treasure-trove of information about the OS.

From early tests/impressions it seems to be very "narrow" in functionalities, with some basic/needed ones are (at the moment) missing or not working properly:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/183672-windows-11-validation-os...

All in all it seems like an early Beta of something that could become useful.

> The cd command is also buggy: It doesn't work for directories located on CD/DVD drives (You can however still access content on CD/DVD using direct paths):

> cd d:\

That's not a bug, is it? `cd` requires the `/d` flag to switch drives, or you can just type the drive letter name.

https://superuser.com/questions/135214/using-cd-command-in-w...

Yeah, in DOS & Windows, each drive has its own working directory. "cd d:\" changes the working directory for D: but keeps the current drive as C:

# Change directory

C:\> cd WINDOWS

# Switch drive

C:\WINDOWS> D:

# Change directory again

D:\> cd DATA

# Switch drive again

D:\DATA> C:

# It remembered that we were in WINDOWS on C:

C:\WINDOWS>

# Change directory on D:

C:\WINDOWS> cd D:\POTATO

# That didn't change the directory for our shell

C:\WINDOWS>

# Switch over to D:

C:\WINDOWS> D:

# It did change the directory for D:, though

D:\POTATO>

> Yeah, in DOS & Windows, each drive has its own working directory.

On Windows, no, it doesn't, it's an illusion maintained by CMD using environment variables, for compatibility with DOS. Quoting Raymond Chen (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100506-00/?p=14...):

"Win32 does not have the concept of a separate current directory for each drive, but the command processor wanted to preserve the old MS-DOS behavior because people were accustomed to it (and batch files relied upon it). The solution was to store this “per-drive current directory” in the environment, using a weird-o environment variable name so it wouldn’t conflict with normal environment variables."

I mean, functionally the parent comment is accurate. There is a working directory kept for each drive.

Just because in Windows it's done using environment variables doesn't mean that the net experience isn't "each drive has a working directory".

> I mean, functionally the parent comment is accurate.

Not really-this is something only cmd.exe does-not the Windows APIs, not any other Windows program (well, any other program could support the same undocumented environment variables as cmd.exe does, but very few do-I’m not aware of any).

If someone mistakenly thinks this is how Windows works, as opposed to only one small component of it, they are going to get confused at some point.

Where else but cmd.exe does the OS keeping track of the current working directory even apply?

A process is associated with a current working directory, which you can change[1].

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/n...

Every process in the system has a current working directory, which is used to resolve all relative paths passed to (Win32) file system APIs. That is a single working directory per-process, not per-drive. In this regard, Windows’ behaviour is very similar to that of Unix-like systems (including Linux and macOS)

Does DOS have a per-process per-drive working directory? That would be the only time where they'd be comparable. I would expect the system for managing per-process and per-terminal CWDs to be completely separate and not interlinked.

> Does DOS have a per-process per-drive working directory?

In DOS, there is a system-wide current drive, and system-wide per-drive current directory. For a Windows DOS box (and 16-bit Windows apps), "system-wide" is per VM, maintained by the virtual machine manager (VMM in Windows 2.x/3.x/9x/Me, NTVDM for NT and successors)

In 32-bit/64-bit Windows, there is a single directory per-process. CMD.EXE provides an (incomplete) emulation of the old DOS model using environment variables; COMMAND.COM performed no equivalent function, it relied on the DOS kernel to track them on its behalf, essentially the same as any other DOS program did

> I would expect the system for managing per-process and per-terminal CWDs to be completely separate and not interlinked.

It isn't actually "per-terminal"; a Windows console in itself has no concept of current drive or directory, and can simultaneously host multiple processes each with different current directories. Consoles also have nothing to do with this "per-drive current directory" emulation performed by CMD.EXE, which is implemented using per-process environment variables

What is is on the back end makes no difference. If you want to access your DVD drive as a user, you have to access it via drive letter... Open windows explorer, add a USB drive, DVD drive, secondary hard drive... they come up by default with their own drive letter, and unless you mount the disk to a path locally, that's how users will see the drive. And if you mount it to an existing path, guess where it ends up? C:\mymounteddrive. Drive letters are critical to Windows still.

just use "pushd" instead of "cd" - as bonus you get directories saved to stack that you can "popd", much like unix.

I often start my .bat/.cmd files with

    @echo off
    pushd "%~dp0"

e.g. no matter from where, ensure that the current folder is the folder of the .bat/.cmd file

This thing is literally made for running, say, a very specialized application that does manufacturer-level hardware testing/validation, likely in an automated fashion, spitting the result out to the display, network, etc. Looking at this as an interactive shell/OS to be used directly is thinking about it the wrong way.

Windows does seem to have strategy-shifted a lot since the 2000-2010ish era. I recently installed Windows 10 the official way on a fresh PC, it allowed installing with no license key. It allowed installing with a local-only account.

The installation appears fully functional. It's not prompting for any key or licensing.

They finally just seem glad that someone is using their software...

What edition of Windows 10 were you installing? The home/consumer versions currently have several dark patterns that push you to create a Microsoft account and link it to your PC login when installing Windows.

The trick is not having internet enabled. When there is no internet, it switches to local account creation.

Current Insider version of 11 has removed this option totally. Long live the clould.

> Similar to Windows 11 Home edition, Windows 11 Pro edition now requires internet connectivity during the initial device setup (OOBE) only. If you choose to setup device for personal use, MSA will be required for setup as well. You can expect Microsoft Account to be required in subsequent WIP flights.

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2022/02/16/announc...

https://webmediums.com/amp/p/tlvo1qetw4z2

The new dark pattern avoidance trick is entering "no@thankyou.com" or some other banned account email using anything as the password.

It still requires internet connection for identifying the ban?

Damnit. Then I will have to always pirate Enterprise SKU to avoid the MS Account BS.

You didn't get a key prompt, because it's probably baked into the BIOS, or your system signature was verified against the activation servers. They have been doing this since Windows 8 came out. It's always allowed a local account, since the day it came out. It's just that they clearly prioritize a Microsoft account, and try to push you into it.

No, Windows just straight up doesn't require a key. All you really get locked out of without one is setting the wallpaper.

The most of the other settings are disabled as well. System is quite limited after that grace period.

In old versions of Windows this used to be true but in current versions system settings are fully functional outside of personalization (as in the "Personalization" section of Settings which covers wallpaper/theme/icons. Not "personalization" of every other section in the Settings app). No auto restarts anymore either.

Something good has happened.

That's ironic, because it means MS still knows how much people value customising their environment that they're using it as way to encourage activation and thus $$$, but at the same time they're also slowly removing such settings.

If you've ever seen Windows 11's default light theme you might understand it's really a ransom system ;).

I jest but really I think most home users just care about setting a theme and a wallpaper, nothing more, and Microsoft knows that. As technically superior as the legacy UI customization was where you could set the font, color, padding, size, etc of UI element xyz specifically most people were really only interested in clicking the theme button to turn XP from blue to silver and changing their wallpaper. The ones actually interested in putting in the work to truly customize the UI are likely a vanishingly small overlap with those that don't have a Windows license and won't pirate on top of already being a tiny minority to start with.

If it doesn't say "windows needs activation" on the desktop it's because it was shipped with a hardware license.

Hmmm, it was a used motherboard I bought on ebay...

Yup, that'll do it.

I got a free copy of windows accidentally this way. I bought a used thinkpad for linux, and ended up installing Windows "temporarily" to play some games out of desperation, but the seller hadn't deactivated the bios Windows key so it auto-authenticated. Oops

And if you do want to set the wallpaper (and get rid of the annoying activation watermark), you could always run vlmcsd somewhere on the network and activate as many Windows and Office installs as your heart desires.

Would love a Microsoft Gaming OS where I could run a browser, steam, and nothing else.

you mean the xbox?

can xbox run on my own hardware?

https://xemu.app/

I checked unboxingelf’s question for the word “vintage” - negative ; )

Just wait a little longer and Arch Linux can do that for you because of the Steam Deck.

Game support is already good.

> Game support is already good.

And, unfortunately, very far from complete. It is a good direction, however, and I am encouraged by it.

I mean, you could just log into your pc and just run a browser, steam, and nothing else.

Sure, on top of the 30000 services Windows automatically runs.

Easier said than done, I tried paring down a bunch of seemingly unnecessary services on my Windows machine and it wound up breaking things in unexpected places.

Did you know that turning off handwriting recognition for tablets makes it so keyboard presses do not cause the lock screen to open to the password textbox, or that it breaks the ability to start typing in the start menu for search results? There's probably a good reason for this, but now I'm way more cautious about turning services off.

I understand the eternal desire for optimisation, but it’s a game of diminishing returns. Most of the items people agonise over in taskman.exe aren’t using negligible memory and cycles. The software for your RGB keyboard is probably less efficient. Kill Teams, browsers and anything edge that actually handles content, and you’re probably at 95% capacity.

svchost.exe begs to differ.

it's not so much the running processes, as it is the unpredictable nature of scheduled tasks which do things that just suck performance away from games. those things often run with very odd priorities and very odd schedules or triggers. Also, when games are run and windows doesn't really get to see the mouse move normally because the game has captured it and controls it, windows sees this as "idle" time in some ways, and will handle background activities via the task scheduler. in any use pattern that is not gaming, this is the correct behavior.

a windows OS mode that is single user, networked, and meant for limited use (so background housekeeping windows tasks run after you exit or reboot out of this mode) would be pretty ideal, not just for raw performance (which would be measurable, but not the main goal) but to avoid apparently random decreases in performance due to Windows deciding to do something, or suddenly needing to deal with an authentication request dealing with mapped drives, or something.

Basically, Windows needs a "Game Console Mode".

They already sell systems with that preinstalled. It's called an XBox.

Fyi Windows does have a game mode that will do some of those things.

If you want to get super crazy, I'll boot a second copy of Windows off of a vhdx file that's stripped down if I want extra performance.

With a little bit of work you can even clone the sid of your main os, and symlink most of your existing files and info, so it's almost identical to your main OS.

Calyp.to's guide is one of the best I've seen for stripping windows down to reduce latency.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1c2-lUJq74wuYK1WrA_bI...

By nothing else you meant: Cortana; Edge and its pop-up when you open Firefox/Chrome; The internet-first search bar that might look into your actual files if you skim through enough Bing results; Windows defender; Windows media player, and image viewer, and an odd looking Paint revamp; All the Win8-style apps not meant for a PC, including an email client,a calendar yet another Photo viewer, something that wants hard to access your phone. All this without including Space Cadet.

And if you didn't do a clean install you can probably add a ton of extra stuff: Office trial; Another anti-virus, why not make your gaming environment even slower?; Games for a 5yo; Updaters and drivers that will haunt your system tray.

Others have already suggested this, but I'm going to re-mention that Proton on Linux has gotten very very good, so you might be able to get away with just installing a hyper-minimalist distro (e.g. Arch, Gentoo, Linux From Scratch, in order of necessary masochism), and just install Steam and Firefox. You could even use a hyper-minimal GUI, e.g. OpenBox or i3 or XMonad.

"browser and steam" already is going to pull in a huge, huge subset of the functionality included in full Windows. Google has slowly piled huge amounts of stuff into Chrome like support for MIDI, and Steam embeds a bunch of stuff too and has weird features you might not know about (for example, a media player with custom playlist support)

Another thing is that many games rely on older APIs and libraries that are bundled into Windows for compatibility reasons, so if you strip those out to make a slim gaming windows, your games won't work.

Maybe try Windows LTSB/LTSC. Not sure what will break, but there's a community around those.

As someone that uses Windows exclusively for games and with no SSD, this was the only solution that made using Windows tolerable.

Nothing worse than your friends inviting you to play a quick match and be held by windows update screen for 15-30mins before you are even able to open Steam, and since I rarely boot the PC, all the time that I reserved for gaming was wasted by Windows.

There is significant drawbacks of LTSC, no Microsoft Store means no access to Game Pass, which has some good games, and some of the MP games only works among game pass users. Ended up buying an SSD and using the Enterprise version and stopping updates.

You can install the Microsoft Store on LTSC. I even had the Xbox Game Bar more-or-less working.

The bigger issue is that Win10 LTSC is increasingly far behind a "normal" Win10 (let alone Win11), which makes things increasingly screwy when it comes to both up-to-date drivers and anticheat. Fortnite, for example, would cause my machine to BSOD within 30 seconds of loading (if not sooner) due to (I suspect) its combination of EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye getting derailed; upgrading to Win11 (and putting up with its bullshit) seems to have fixed it.

How do we add links to a comment? https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/login https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/search-results

> Validation OS boots into a Command Line environment to increase reliability on the factory floor and supports running Win32 apps, smoothing the transition from early hardware bring-up to retail OS and apps development.

What about my Silverlight and Metro apps? Win32 is old and deprecated!

I was kinda hoping something like a windows kernel that booted to a cmd window and let me install directx and steam..

Alas, this is not Windows XP Embedded. Microsoft regressed from this along time ago.

Kinda like Windows Server Core but for client GUI Windows would be nice. I feel like Windows Professional isn't really professional enough for my taste. The included features lack and the defaults are awful.

I've been trying to game on mac via a VM (I know I know don't say it), and one option is to take a windows 11 ARM build, and strip everything out of it. It works....okay.

I actually game on a Mac and have had fairly good luck with VMWare Fusion. Granted, I'm not playing the cutting-edge stuff, but I just finished Typing of the Dead: Overkill entirely inside a VM with no apparent problems. I have an i9 CPU, purchased the Macbook about a month before the M1 was announced.

I'm actually a bit surprised though; what's the compatibility like in the ARM build of Windows 11?

Its decent. Forget about any modern DX12 games, but I can count on one hand the number of games that have not worked properly outside of that. Considering the type of games I play now-a-days, it's not too terrible of a loss to be honest.

If I am in the mood for something that doesn't work or more modern than say The Witcher 3, I just boot up the desktop in windows. Its like the best of everything: I don't have to use the hell that is Windows 11 for general computing and I can treat the desktop as a compute server when I am crunching numbers.

This looks to me a bit like second coming of Windows Server Nano edition

It's a different composition, this seems to be a derivative of some 'CloudCore' product used internally with Azure, with layered compositions affectionately named 'run levels' (the full GUI boot also known as ClientCore is apparently '3', but '2' would be a console-only boot like Nano Server).

There's an interesting 'hello and enjoy' text file left in here describing this run level:

               HELLO!
  
  The OS is booted to RunLevel 3 (CLIENTCORE).
  
  Services are STARTED at this run level.
  
  All OneCore compliant apps can run.
  GUI apps (that depend on user32 and gdi only) can run.
  
  Run 'memstat' to see memory usage.
  Run 'tlist -s' to see running processes and services.
  
  'njoy.

Okay, that's hilarious; did MS intentionally recreate sysv service management, or did they independently arrive at the same place with the same name?

By 'affectionately named', I rather think someone thought it sounded cool to name it such. Perhaps CloudCore proper allows 'upgrading' a running system to the 'Win3' composition in case one would want to run GUI diagnostics, but other than that the run level terminology doesn't mean much as it's rather a distinction made at image staging time.

init.d is back, baby! Windows is certified SystemD-free :D

The previous version of this, Factory OS, ran all of the Win32 apps in a microVM (which was the planned functionality for Windows 10X), while UWP apps could run natively. I wonder if this does something similar or if that was dropped.

(I spent some time trying to figure out how the VM is created to see if something like that could be done in regular Windows, but much of it is undocumented. Being able to only run one Windows Sandbox at a time in regular Windows kills some of my workflows.)

FactoryOS is from an entirely different set of compositions (composable core/WCOS, meant to reduce the amount of MobileCore-based SKUs) which was meant for a few new products (10X, HubOS, Andromeda) that never really shipped and got changed around and canceled numerous times. It is curious, however, as to why there is no WSK released for the 'Nickel' release of Windows (with build 22621 as final), and instead we got this image dropped instead.

The VM was rather an image of a similar composition to this one (ContainerOS shares some component roots) running in the Host Compute Service which actually is properly documented nowadays after a while of only being partially documented in Docker for Windows code: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/hcs/over...

This was my first thought as well, I got some exposure to Windows Server Nano edition (basically an officially supported headless Windows version if unfamiliar) when I was unfortunate enough to work on a project with native Windows containers, where Nano edition provides the stripped down Windows runtime etc. I had some headless browsers running in Windows Server Nano edition at one point, worked after I installed a few random missing pieces.

Was it per chance a project in Poland involving a certain networking gear vendor's SDN product?

The HIREN Windows version has always been my fave. Installing it to an HD for daily use has never worked, though.

Is the idea here that this is a streamlined version of Windows to help you debug the production image that you are putting on devices in the factory? In other words rather you use this rather than Linux on your development laptop to connect to the recently flashed device over USB/serial/etc. Or is the idea here that this is a mode that you can flip on in a device that you just flashed in order to debug it? Sorry if my terminology is off.

Windows Minimal Install ISO!

I said this on a previous thread, but I'd like to see someone build a lightweight graphical UI desktop for this, that just keeps out of the way and lets you just get on with using your machine like Windows used to be.

> Validation OS boots into a Command Line environment to increase reliability on the factory floor and supports running Win32 apps

This is the kind of comment that probably will get downvoted here, but it feels pretty weird to be old enough to remember when booting to a command line was normal, and now it's seen as a feature. It's easy to forget when Windows was the shell, not the OS, and that it was simpler and easier on the system to boot to a minimal state and allow the user to escalate from there.

Honestly, I can totally relate to this feeling. While reading that same line, I was taken back to being a kid and having to install Windows this way. It's amazing how much time and advancement can make what used to be normal, feel nostalgic. I'm glad to see this kind of "Feature" come back around.

Everything that is old will be new again some day.

What blew my mind is that a generation of kids that rely on Google drives and chromebooks don’t know what directory and file structures are

And even people opining that it’s time to do away with them.

A high percentages of users don't and never did understand file trees and how to navigate them. They find their files by rote repetition and spatial memory. This is how people end up with desktops covered in files and directories—that's how they find stuff, and the notion you can start in one of those directories and move around until you're in one of their other on-the-desktop directories is foreign. It "is" in a particular place on their desktop, in their mind.

I've had users get completely lost when their screen res changed and all the icons got rearranged.

I don't think so, everyone I know can use "ls" and "cd" and has Show Desktop Icons off (if using Windows)

Then you only know power users and computer geeks.

I did and do understand file trees and how to navigate them, and I think they aren't good. They are a carryover from the physical world of "a place for everything and everything in its place" which means you need to remember which room and cupboard and shelf everything is, go there, open the cupboard, and get it.

In a computer, it can be "anything you want appears wherever you are, when you need it". This is hugely more convenient. Let the computer deal with storage (and versioning) similar to garbage collection dealing with memory management. Locate on Linux and VoidTools Everything on Windows let you conjour things up without caring where they were stored, and increasingly photo libraries let you search by the content of pictures rather than the filename. Full-text search is also imaginable although on Windows it's not been good enough to use for years.

The idea that the ever-growing list of things I use a computer for should take an ever-growing amount of space in my head to remember where everything is, is a bad idea. "Everything" tells me my comptuer has roughly 1.4 million files; most of them were put there by installers, not directly by me. If I can not-care about the location and storage of ~99% of them, why can't I not-care about the storage arrangement of 100% of them?

>If I can not-care about the location and storage of ~99% of them, why can't I not-care about the storage arrangement of 100% of them?

Because this 1% are files that actually matter.

There's always a more ignorant user. I don't find this argument persuasive. The non-filesystem-centric data storage systems I'm familiar with are far worse. Instead of portable files which you can do with as you please, you're confined to preconceived integrations that developers thought of, like iPhone apps that let you "share" information with other apps.

Computer education (and educators) are often terrible.

I think there is a large part of certain generations who were taught poorly by people who didn’t like or understand computers, so it’s not surprising that people that have poor education have poor understanding of computers.

I implore you: spend a few days at your local public library offering basic tech support. There's a reason why you see arguments for doing away with the traditional filesystem -- there's a large cohort of users for whom it's genuinely difficult to use.

I would just spend the entire time apologizing to everyone.

This isn’t what we thought would happen …

We didn’t mean for it to be this way …

I’m sorry they’re doing this …

I have a niece that literally did not know how to turn her Thinkpad off. The selected power profile puts the PC to sleep when the power button is pressed and closing the lid is set to do nothing.

She's part of Gen-Z and I can understand why she doesn't know any better. She spends the majority of her time on phones and tablets, and this is her first genuine PC that she's spent an appreciable amount of time on. I suppose I'm lucky that computers were not easy to use when I was growing up and that I necessarily had to become comfortable using the command-line and toying with the nuts and bolts of how the operating system does things.

You have a niece who didn't know how to turn her ThinkPad off.

Unless she has one of those boutique gender identities.

Whoops, I've got some bad English today. Fixed.

I don't know precisely how long Windows was without a command line boot, but Windows Server Core came out with Server 2008, and has been improved on with Nano in recent versions of Server. These both boot to the command line. IIRC Core's "command line" was still using a lightweight window manager just to provide a box around the shell, but Nano doesn't even have that.

With every release the "desktop experience" gets marked more and more as an optional extra you probably don't need, I find that amusingly optimistic but maybe I'm the odd one.

That's because "windows the shell" is a long dead thing that shares little code with NT - whose end user usable versions always booted into graphical mode (outside of installer and emergency console)

> ... with NT - whose end user usable versions always booted into graphical mode (outside of installer and emergency console)

Elaborating on this... the "Windows console" host (csrss.exe, analogous to a tty manager) is actually one of the few core Windows "subsystems" that actually runs as a Win32 usermode service instead of being baked into the NT kernel. Furthermore, up until Windows 8 (when the legacy XDDM[1] was removed), this system actually had the capability to draw a console in VGA text mode, bypassing the graphical session (and most of the rest of the kernel) entirely[2].

As you say, this is probably how most Windows non-graphical modes worked: bring up the VGA driver, skip starting the graphical subsystem, bring up csrss in VGA text mode. That all changed when Windows Vista deprecated XDDM in favor of DWM, which monopolizes access to the pipeline. From that point forward, such "non-graphical" releases (almost?) always bring up a graphical display session and window manager as part of the boot process. The only "non-graphical" thing about these is that they disable a few shell components and services, autostart a console window, and maybe stub out some of the win32 API.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di... [2]: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1243573/Vga-Text-Mode-T...

“Windows the shell” is even longer dead than most people think. Windows 95 and beyond, despite not being based on NT, were fully 32-bit OSes and ran DOS in a VM (but tried very hard to make it seem like it was the other way around, for when apps relied on DOS functionality).

Even win 3.1 did that in a mandatory way with it dropping support for Real mode, and Standard and Enhanced were available for windows 2 already. And Windows applications of that era went through Windows API and Windows drivers, not DOS ones (although windows itself could fallback to DOS drivers in some cases)

And like everyone knew how to use the command line, even if it was at a very basic level.

"Knew".

My parents wrote sequences of commands on a piece of paper that told them how to launch various programs. These were usually captured from manuals or from the output of installation processes (launched by following the manual). They had no idea how to figure any of it out on their own. What's "cd"? No clue. How does the filesystem look? How do you figure out where you are and get to where you need to be? Dunno.

The commands were just magic words to make the computer do the thing you wanted.

> It's easy to forget when Windows was the shell, not the OS, and that it was simpler and easier on the system to boot to a minimal state and allow the user to escalate from there.

i don't think it was designed that way, but rather was a function of the way it evolved.

i don't miss the days of windows on top of dos on personal computers, other than perhaps the puzzles that came with installing new hardware or software. freezes and crashes were a fact of daily life and the device driver situation was insane.

and no, it didn't need to be that way. reliable computers did exist at the time. although, to be fair, the pc compatible as an open ecosystem of hardware and software vendors was a whole new model.

"Validation OS spawns X Server with xterm as DE, and supports X11R7 apps"

Basically this is this if it had been Ubuntu, not a “runlevel 3” build of Windows

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