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bbidulock / blackboxwm

A window manager for X11
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Probably a silly question - Shell for server usage? #27

Closed DumboJet closed 4 years ago

DumboJet commented 4 years ago

I was currently thinking of having a windows server at home for serving a web site, but when I saw the prices I got a heart attack.

When I came across this project, my first thought was: Replacing the Windows shell with something that does nothing is as close as a Windows Desktop OS can get to Windows Server Edition.

At least, some attack vectors from the shell will go away (although, I suppose, the MS shell files are still on the disk and can potentially be exploited) and the resource consumption from the graphical interface can be minimized as done in the Windows Core editions. Also, there are no core/user/device licensing restrictions on Windows Desktop (Home or Pro), so this is great.

Have you ever thought of going towards this alternate direction? I am not an expert on this, but replacing the shell with something that does nothing sounds way easier than replacing it with a functional shell. And it has real value, since all MS Windows can be managed remotely via Windows Admin Center nowadays.

Some downsides to this are :

  1. You still have the whole OS on the disk that requires many GBs.
  2. You still have to apply huge updates.
  3. Maybe you still have to restart often.
  4. WAC does not seem to support triggering remote updates on Home and Pro editions. But that should be fixable since there are PowerShell scripts online that do that.
DumboJet commented 4 years ago

I have posted this to the Open-Shell project, just in case they are interested too.

bbidulock commented 4 years ago

What has this got to do with BlackBox window manager????

DumboJet commented 4 years ago

Oups! I thought this was also an alternative shell for Windows as well, but now I see it says : "A window manager for X11" Not sure I remember what link has sent me here. So, it was a silly question after all... :)