> This was more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable. Virtually nothing can run due to critical missing files such as common dialog boxes and common controls.
[0]: https://x.com/XenoPanther/status/1983579460906487835?t=7jLSz...
I wonder if this could be used to cobble together some duct-tape windows-7-based firecrackers vm thing.
Back in the day, MS did even release Nano Server as a standalone OS, from what I gather it was generally <500MB. Pretty decent for a Windows you could actually run applications on.
I worked on porting certain Software Defined Networking product to Windows platform, for use with Hyper-V. Nano Server was new and we tried to target it as one of the options, especially since it was implied to be recommended way to deploy Hyper-V hosts. And yes, IIRC it took less than 500MB, but it couldn't run most windows applications (for example, GUI was missing).
So much was stripped out that at one point I ended up with reverse-engineered Windows Update packaging (unfortunately lost my notes) because the oldest form of Windows Installer, the one used with INF files for drivers, could not be used fully - specifically, we could not run any kind of action in our own DLL when initializing the drivers. And messing with the right registry keys was fraught with peril.
Do not recall all issues, but essentially we were trying to create a package that could be applied with DISM.EXE onto Nano Server image.