I have released a 69.0MB version of Windows 7 x86
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> This was more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable. Virtually nothing can run due to critical missing files such as common dialog boxes and common controls.
[0]: https://x.com/XenoPanther/status/1983579460906487835?t=7jLSz...
I wonder if this could be used to cobble together some duct-tape windows-7-based firecrackers vm thing.
Back in the day, MS did even release Nano Server as a standalone OS, from what I gather it was generally <500MB. Pretty decent for a Windows you could actually run applications on.
Are people using these in production? I assume so, with libvirt handling them on k8s for a vmware transition option.
I worked on porting certain Software Defined Networking product to Windows platform, for use with Hyper-V. Nano Server was new and we tried to target it as one of the options, especially since it was implied to be recommended way to deploy Hyper-V hosts. And yes, IIRC it took less than 500MB, but it couldn't run most windows applications (for example, GUI was missing).
So much was stripped out that at one point I ended up with reverse-engineered Windows Update packaging (unfortunately lost my notes) because the oldest form of Windows Installer, the one used with INF files for drivers, could not be used fully - specifically, we could not run any kind of action in our own DLL when initializing the drivers. And messing with the right registry keys was fraught with peril.
Do not recall all issues, but essentially we were trying to create a package that could be applied with DISM.EXE onto Nano Server image.
Similarly, this is still windows 7.
Besides this old debate is pretty silly because I doubt anyone could propose (and get a majority of us to agree on) a formal definition of an operating system that would allow us to unambiguously say "that's an OS competent", "that's an OS", and "that's just software that ships with the OS" across a suite of OS's.
"Windows 7" brings a lot of connotations, including the ability to run Windows 7 software. Without that what makes it different to Windows XP?
https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries
That adds various NT 6 APIs and even compatibility modes for various newer versions of Windows up to Windows 11. At a glance, it appears to have support for Vulkan, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 through software rendering, with the option of using WineD3D to get hardware accelerated Direct3D 10 and 11. I assume old WineD3D-PBA binaries run very nicely on that.
Interestingly, the developer suggests that installing graphics drivers from newer versions of Windows might be possible at some point, which I assume would provide native hardware acceleration for newer graphics APIs and support for recent graphics cards:
> WDDM is not impossible, only very hard. Currently initializes and the subsystem runs, but every driver fails to communicate with it's internal hardware due 2000/XP/2003 doesn't have support for MSI/MSI-X interrupt, required to WDDM drivers works;
https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries/i...
Sure but are those connotation consistent across people (this thread would tend to say no)? If not, that is essentially the core of my argument that nobody agrees on what "OS" means.
When that old hardware dies, it would likely be replaced with a similar design rather than more evolved hardware. This would mean we’d have to develop for longevity. Developing for longevity, could mean that software would flourish. Software flourishing could include malware and inefficient software sold to fight malware. Therefore, it is more secure and efficient to continually evolve operating systems to require new hardware, to reduce longevity and the flourishing of software.
Ah, makes me reminisce installing Office 6.0 on Windows 3.1 and getting "3D" dialogs, from ctl3d.dll
This post has screenshots of the dialogs: http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?t=14706
Or perhaps that won't be necessary because certain enterprise customers will insist on local accounts and it will be easier for pirates to just tap into that install path? One way or another, if/when local accounts go away I hope there's some option to work around it.
I want Linux software, instead.
(I'm old enough to have once had a "better Windows than Windows" experience, with OS/2 Warp -- ~30 years ago. It was a very nice system that completely failed to thrive, with many back then blaming its quite good Windows compatibility for that failure.)
There's also projects that modify a system less deeply, like Sophia Script.
These days the default windows install is so garbage that I have little issue running semi-open source customizations like these.
In reality, truly airgapped PCs are rare. They are usually just there to run some specific application that likely can't run on anything safe to connect to the network. Unless you're both the admin and the only user, an airgapped PC is disadvantageous for security reasons. There's no one monitoring what the users are doing with it, how do you know if anything malicious is running on it if the only reference you have is the PC itself? It's like owning a single clock and never checking to see if the time is actually correct. You're more likely to find airgapped networks that allow for monitoring of the hardware and what users are doing with it. Of course there will always be things like malware testing but with how smart malware is now, it's pretty good at detecting when it running airgapped and won't actually do anything until it knows it can phone home.
there is a lot of measuring equipment running Windows
They're pushing hard to push all active directory to Azure AD and the like.
If you mean when no edition of Windows allows local users... I mean, there's a lot of other things which have to come to Enterprise before we get there. I wonder if Windows will lose relevance before that level of change occurs.
You could even make your own, starting with the file manager from Windows 3.1 and some files from a Windows 95 CD (the installer for 95 ran a stripped down 3.1)
Okay fine. They have a lot of services and that would be hard. I'll be happy with ec2, S3, and the other core services.
At the time, the idea of an operating system using a gigabyte of space was a fantasy to most people. Now, I wonder when Microsoft Windows will pass the terabyte threshold.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060221142148/https://www.sysin...
Squares? Pigeon holes? Cookie jars?
Oh I remember VMs pods and containers
DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealthhttps://archive.org/details/smallest-windows-xp-rtm-sp-0
I assume the minimal version of Windows XP still has components that were stripped out of this version of windows 7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux
Also, it looks revived:
Meanwhile Tiny7, Tiny10, Tiny11 entered the chatroom..
And though they are 10x+ bigger in size, they are still barebones Windows OS (without all the clutter that Micro$oft tends to overload on Windows releases these days; I am looking at you Mr.Copilot) that work well for most use cases.
I personally used Tiny11 to set up my home PC, it is compact and usable.
They'd annoy me if I didn't feel so bad for them. They're the types who will lament on their death bed that they didn't allow themselves to do more things for enjoyment.