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Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

The Windows we want:

The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.

Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.

That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.

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Yeah it’s funny how at this moment I’d pay more for less Windows.

But I’ve found my way on Linux long ago. Sure not all software is there and MS365 fully from browser has so many annoyances, but I love the OS minimalism, how clean it is.

My ideal windows in indeed win2000, but in a transparent VM so I can just do the Windows apps. I need LSW, Linux subsystem for Windows, essentially.

I live in Linux but still have some need for the Windows Runtime from time to time. If only Windows containers were at the level of the Linux ones, I’d flip the whole world up side down.

podman run ms365-full —license-key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

I’d pay for that. But such a system only provides value, it does not extract it. It is a 180 of the way they have been thinking for a long time now.

its worth trying really really hard to get windows apps running through wine before reaching for a vm imho. once you open a vm you have to deal with ... well... windows.

I did it in the past, vmware (where the desktop was transparant so it was like Windows on Linux), CrossOver office, Wine (bottles).

Recently I tried to get Windows running using quickemu but that also failed.

All just so that I don't have to experience MS365 in the browser where I will regularly click "New message" (in Outlook) and start typing but my browser interprets all characters as shortcuts (as if I held alt or something??) messing up my inbox to various degrees before I become aware, ending up with a pile op messages in "archive". I hate the daily re-logins in Teams (which does not tell you it's logged out, your messages just hang and the menu is empty). Word simply deletes my last 2 sentences from time to time (even though it assures me on every frightened ctrl-s that it's all fine!!), etc, etc.

And we're not even talking about the hoops you have to jump through when a doc is not on SharePoint/OneDrive but on a NAS.

sounds painful, just searched on "how can i get ms office running in linux using wine" and the results included a containerised windows vm that looks very interesting. but yes i agree, they seem to have gone to a lot of effort to make office use a billion microservices that would be a nightmare to run through wine.

edit: nvm, the docker vm thing looks really slow, id rather use libreoffice (which is quite good really). and now europe is trying to cut the umbilical you can probably expect a lot more open source productivity stuff in the near future too.

The minimal install should be so minimal that you feel naked, like you need to immediately start installing stuff to get anything useful done.

I do not care what you give people who don't select "minimal install" - that's their problem.

Yes, that's what is needed in the first place and it should be the industry standard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500845

Sadly, I don't think we ever see such approach.

There even used to be a "minimal install" option back when installing Windows 95.

Hopefully they don’t give up the TPM requirement given it also comes with a VBS capable processor which is important to Windows kernel security.

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