[HN Gopher] Microsoft Validation OS
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft Validation OS
Author : maxbaines
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-07-13 08:18 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.microsoft.com)
| kaycebasques wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| Alpine Linux is even smaller as a minimalist system, and then
| there are things like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31977164
| smoldesu wrote:
| You can _definitely_ get smaller from there, I was using an
| example of another common desktop operating system for
| reference though
| gjvc wrote:
| ridiculous.
| greggsy wrote:
| 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.
| aaaronic wrote:
| _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.
| afavour wrote:
| Is the EULA specific to this software or a generic boilerplate
| one MS uses everywhere?
| skneko wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Judging by
| https://msfn.org/board/topic/183672-windows-11-validation-
| os..., there's the GUI and a number of its subsystems in there.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| If you haven't seen the Windows version of "command line
| only", it's kinda funny: https://youtu.be/wUTW7Z9p6tY?t=347
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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/...
| mcculley wrote:
| I love that there are now versions of Windows without
| windows.
| alerighi wrote:
| 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.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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.
| hermitdev wrote:
| 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.
| frontrowseat wrote:
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| ninjaoxygen wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| This looks to me a bit like second coming of Windows Server Nano
| edition
| giobox wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| Was it per chance a project in Poland involving a certain
| networking gear vendor's SDN product?
| ntauthority wrote:
| 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.
| easton wrote:
| 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.)
| ntauthority wrote:
| 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...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Okay, that's hilarious; did MS _intentionally_ recreate sysv
| service management, or did they independently arrive at the
| same place with the same name?
| ntauthority wrote:
| 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.
| jaboutboul wrote:
| Windows Minimal Install ISO!
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| 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...
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| No, Windows just straight up doesn't require a key. All you
| really get locked out of without one is setting the
| wallpaper.
| alar44 wrote:
| If it doesn't say "windows needs activation" on the desktop
| it's because it was shipped with a hardware license.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Hmmm, it was a used motherboard I bought on ebay...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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
| alar44 wrote:
| Yup, that'll do it.
| yellowapple wrote:
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| The most of the other settings are disabled as well. System
| is quite limited after that grace period.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| Something good has happened.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| beart wrote:
| 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.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| The trick is not having internet enabled. When there is no
| internet, it switches to local account creation.
| nicce wrote:
| 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
| zamadatix wrote:
| The new dark pattern avoidance trick is entering
| "no@thankyou.com" or some other banned account email
| using anything as the password.
| nicce wrote:
| It still requires internet connection for identifying the
| ban?
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| Damnit. Then I will have to always pirate Enterprise SKU
| to avoid the MS Account BS.
| eddieroger wrote:
| > 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.
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway48292 wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| 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)
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| "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).
| temac wrote:
| 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)
| chaorace wrote:
| > ... 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...
| dawnerd wrote:
| And like everyone knew how to use the command line, even if it
| was at a very basic level.
| corrral wrote:
| "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.
| a-dub wrote:
| > 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| "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
| [deleted]
| tizio13 wrote:
| 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.
| newsclues wrote:
| 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
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| You have a _niece_ who didn 't know how to turn her
| ThinkPad off.
|
| Unless she has one of those boutique gender identities.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Whoops, I've got some bad English today. Fixed.
| eloisius wrote:
| And even people opining that it's time to do away with
| them.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| 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.
| rsync wrote:
| 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 ...
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 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?
| ourmandave wrote:
| I've had users get completely lost when their screen res
| changed and all the icons got rearranged.
| None4U wrote:
| I don't think so, everyone I know can use "ls" and "cd"
| and has Show Desktop Icons off (if using Windows)
| corrral wrote:
| Then you only know power users and computer geeks.
| dusted wrote:
| I was kinda hoping something like a windows kernel that booted to
| a cmd window and let me install directx and steam..
| JusticeJuice wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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?
| sixothree wrote:
| 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.
| BlinkenBlinken wrote:
| Alas, this is not Windows XP Embedded. Microsoft regressed from
| this along time ago.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > 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!
|
| \s
| smm11 wrote:
| The HIREN Windows version has always been my fave. Installing it
| to an HD for daily use has never worked, though.
| unboxingelf wrote:
| Would love a Microsoft Gaming OS where I could run a browser,
| steam, and nothing else.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| you mean the xbox?
| unboxingelf wrote:
| can xbox run on my own hardware?
| chaosmachine wrote:
| https://xemu.app/
| whiteboardr wrote:
| I checked unboxingelf's question for the word "vintage" -
| negative ; )
| chem83 wrote:
| Maybe try Windows LTSB/LTSC. Not sure what will break, but
| there's a community around those.
| jampa wrote:
| 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.
| yellowapple wrote:
| 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.
| greggsy wrote:
| I mean, you could just log into your pc and just run a browser,
| steam, and nothing else.
| unboxingelf wrote:
| Sure, on top of the 30000 services Windows automatically
| runs.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| greggsy wrote:
| 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.
| naikrovek wrote:
| 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".
| olyjohn wrote:
| svchost.exe begs to differ.
| kevingadd wrote:
| "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.
| nicce wrote:
| Just wait a little longer and Arch Linux can do that for you
| because of the Steam Deck.
|
| Game support is already good.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > Game support is already good.
|
| And, unfortunately, very far from complete. It is a good
| direction, however, and I am encouraged by it.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| 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.
| jaclaz wrote:
| 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.
| BoppreH wrote:
| > 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...
| jordemort wrote:
| 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>
| cesarb wrote:
| > 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/o
| ldnewthing/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."
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| malkia wrote:
| just use "pushd" instead of "cd" - as bonus you get
| directories saved to stack that you can "popd", much like
| unix.
| malkia wrote:
| 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
| chrisfinazzo wrote:
| [deleted]
| duffyjp wrote:
| Last night I tried updating some Wifi drivers on Windows
| 10, and clicking the classic "Have Disk" button defaulted
| to A:\
| blowski wrote:
| I remember changing the A: to Z: and feeling like some
| hacker genius.
| 2143 wrote:
| Signed,
|
| Federation of Linux & Unix (incl. Mac) users
|
| (I don't know the scheme in Plan9, Solaris etc)
| Aloha wrote:
| Solaris is Unix for the purposes of this discussion.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| This is the Posix standard which also includes BSD et al.
| [deleted]
| c0nsumer wrote:
| 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.
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