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Makes some amount of sense to do it this way, since that probably means you get things like adjusting the font size or launching accessibility tools bundled in

Makes some amount of sense to do it this way, since that probably means you get things like adjusting the font size or launching accessibility tools bundled in with the graphical frontend + conhost instance. Otherwise that stuff would have to be reimplemented for a 'true console only' mode

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
There's a handful of literal GUIs that load too, for instance, setting the date and time or using task manager. There's some literal GUI screens present... just not many. Note that there is an even more stripped down version of Windows Server without all of these GUI elements: Nano Server! It has no local logon capability at all. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/getting-started-with-nano-server https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/...
- mcculley 4y ago
  I love that there are now versions of Windows without windows.
alerighi 4y ago
If you don't want to implement a console (that is fair) you can just use the console provided by the BIOS (the VGA console, as DOS did back in the days) or nowadays UEFI (as for example GRUB or even Linux if you don't load a graphics driver does). BIOS/UEFI have the primitives necessary to read/write to the console so you can just use them. A text-only console is useful in a lot of situations, for example when the graphics driver doesn't work or crashes (in that situations in Windows you have to reboot or start in recovery mode, while on Linux you can open a text console and with the CLI fix the issue or restart the graphics server). It would also be useful to boot computers without a GPU, by exposing the text console trough a serial port, another thing that you can do in Linux, most embedded devices, such as routers, doesn't have any GPU but a serial port used for the console access (of course only for recovery and debugging, since otherwise you connect trough SSH). By the way the question is not only for hardware that doesn't have the GPU, but also for containers/VM. If you drop the requirement of a GPU it would be far easier and lightweight to virtualize Windows, since you don't have to virtualize any graphics hardware at all but only the CPU. The text console would be provided by the virtualization program itself.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > exposing the text console trough a serial port, another thing that you can do in Linux, NT-based OSes can do that since 3.51, IIRC Edit: for the kernel debug, so not quite the the same thing.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

There's a handful of literal GUIs that load too, for instance, setting the date and time or using task manager. There's some literal GUI screens present... just not many. Note that there is an even more stripped down version of Windows Server without all of these GUI elements: Nano Server! It has no local logon capability at all. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/getting-started-with-nano-server https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/...

mcculley 4y ago
I love that there are now versions of Windows without windows.

alerighi 4y ago

If you don't want to implement a console (that is fair) you can just use the console provided by the BIOS (the VGA console, as DOS did back in the days) or nowadays UEFI (as for example GRUB or even Linux if you don't load a graphics driver does). BIOS/UEFI have the primitives necessary to read/write to the console so you can just use them. A text-only console is useful in a lot of situations, for example when the graphics driver doesn't work or crashes (in that situations in Windows you have to reboot or start in recovery mode, while on Linux you can open a text console and with the CLI fix the issue or restart the graphics server). It would also be useful to boot computers without a GPU, by exposing the text console trough a serial port, another thing that you can do in Linux, most embedded devices, such as routers, doesn't have any GPU but a serial port used for the console access (of course only for recovery and debugging, since otherwise you connect trough SSH). By the way the question is not only for hardware that doesn't have the GPU, but also for containers/VM. If you drop the requirement of a GPU it would be far easier and lightweight to virtualize Windows, since you don't have to virtualize any graphics hardware at all but only the CPU. The text console would be provided by the virtualization program itself.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> exposing the text console trough a serial port, another thing that you can do in Linux, NT-based OSes can do that since 3.51, IIRC Edit: for the kernel debug, so not quite the the same thing.