[pxc]

Making custom Windows install media is insanely painful, even from Windows. I went through the process of creating non-interactive install media for Windows once, and was astonished at how awful it is compared to building custom Linux live media. (Not least of all because of the churn in the XML you have to maintain that basically represents clicking through all the installer menus.)

[hnuser123456]

WAIK? I created a customized Windows install image as a 19 year old intern and presented it to the rest of the IT team...

[fodkodrasz]

It depends on what customizations you'd like to use.

I've also had a very hard time creating an automated install media for an appliance for windows iot... Worst was the (LLM generated?) powershell scripts in the documentation that didn't work at all.

[pxc]

Microsoft's tooling for customizing images amounts to several gigabytes to download and install just to get started.

The Windows approach is based on a mix of relatively limited offline modifications and automating clicks and keystrokes (AutoUnattend.xml, OOBE.xml) and recording or forgetting manual changes (Audit Mode, Sysprep). Both are insanely kludgey.

New development of the tooling always comes to dism.exe first rather than the DISM PowerShell module, so you may need to use DOS commands instead of the (very lovely) modern shell that Microsoft maintains.

Depending on what kind of stuff you're trying to install, you might need to do half a dozen reboots in the course of recording your manual changes.

Mounting/unmounting a WIM file can take more than a minute (wtf?) and if you're working on modifying one of the installer images from upstream, you need dozens of gigabytes of free disk space.

If you don't just want install media, but a bootable repair environment, everything is even worse. Hardware recognition is bad, boot is slow, and only some programs can actually run in a WinPE environment.

Have you ever customized bootable Linux media?

When I had to make some custom NixOS install media for an aarch64 VPS, it required only a few lines of code in the exact same environment as I use to customize running systems, and it's completely declarative, non-interactive, requires no special toolkit, doesn't require dozens of gigabytes of scratch space, never requires me to boot anything...

Teenage interns can also shovel manure, but that doesn't make it pleasant or painless!