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points by happymellon 1 day ago | 0 comments

NT was criminally underrated by Microsoft.

Far too many features required 3rd party tooling to access, or were buried within menus of menus. Then were slowly either duplicated or replaced with half baked solutions.

[–] speed_spread 1 day ago

Microsoft never built the cheap, CLI-only version of NT that would have given Linux a run for its money. It would have helped preserve some of the hacker mindshare they once had with DOS.

[–] tavavex 1 day ago

Doing that would open them to the possibility of a competing stack that could push out the default Windows one, similar to a different Linux distro. Also, they wouldn't be able to be kings of the system and force whatever they want onto you, because you could then switch away to a different NT-based distro. They just wanted the hackers to go away, it's simpler for them.

The closest they ever got to a 'nothing' NT was something like Windows Core or Factory/Validation OS. They still ship with some windowing capabilities, but they could strip them out if they wanted to, because there is a barebones text-only mode in Windows. Of course, all these editions are or were tightly regulated and only issued to big businesses who are supposed to have them, it's nothing that a Linux user would want.

[–] indrora 1 day ago

More specifically, it came at a time where they had to be very careful what they did because they had the DOJ peering down their neck.

Windows didn't ship with a competent PDF reader for over a decade and some because of the DOJ: Any attempt by Microsoft to enter a market that already had a competition was seen as anticompetitive.

It's pretty trivial to get ValidationOS running, even down to RL1 where the kernel and NT execution environment are the only things you have: https://youtu.be/Zw5ysOJcY84?t=610

[–] EvanAnderson 1 day ago

A fever dream of mine is a "distribution" of NT that ships with the Interix subsystem and boots to text mode (or serial console) by default.

[–] justincormack 1 day ago

Windows Nano Server nearly was that although wasnt cheaper.

[–] roryirvine 1 day ago

I'm fairly vague about post-1990s Microsoft products, but wasn't Windows 2008 exactly that?

No GUI, with admin through Powershell, remote MMC snap-ins, or the SCUM/SCOM automation stuff. The managed hosting company I worked for around 2010 used it fairly heavily, and it didn't seem much worse to admin than the CFEngine / Puppet type tooling we had for Linux at the time.

[–] EvanAnderson 1 day ago

Server Core is sort of that. The GUI is still there. You can run full Win32 GUI programs if you bring over the dependencies. There's less bots there but it's not analogous to a lightweight Linux distro that has no windowing environment.