[BatteryMountain]

One problem I see with this is, even though the iso's we download are about 5Gb, they get unpacked into 15Gb+ worth of files. Thus we are either going to have 15Gb+ images floating around to avoid unpacking them on each boot, or each boot becomes 2 to 5 minutes to unpack and all those writes will make ssd sad.

I wish Microsoft just go make a new OS from scratch, that behaves more like other OS's (file/directory slashes, rgb formatting, fonts etc) and that have the core of the system immutable while it is running. Get all user data onto a separate partition. Have a root user + password by default. Have a fancy package manager like apt/dnf (where ALL software can be updated through), have a fancy bootloader menu where you can install system updates from, strip out all language packs, drivers and other useless features (xbox, weather app, phone app), have a new terminal (get rid of cmd + powershell and start from scratch), rebuild diskpart...... the list goes on. Make it lean, fast and make the choice to ignore backwards compatibility with windows. Don't even call it windows for that matter.

Having all that, you can have an isolated, immutable windows in less than 2Gb. All of the extra partitions can exist as VHD's that gets mounted at startup, that way you can copy an entire environment by copying 1 file.

[anthk]

>drivers

Network drivers are always useful.