>goldboot is a tool that builds machine images for real hardware In Windows I use the built-in Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tools for this,

>goldboot is a tool that builds machine images for real hardware In Windows I use the built-in Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tools for this, manipulating the Windows Image .WIM files originally designed for NT6 from Windows Vista onward. With Vista, DISM did not yet exist, WIMs were handled by imagex.exe at the time. >Warning: this tool is totally unfinshed and should be used for testing only! Proceed at your own risk! Goldboot looks promising anyway. For Windows it could be benchmarked against DISM, or even the Wimboot tangent. DISM was not perfect when it first appeared, but after over 10 years it is more well-tested and capable than ever. You can autoingest a configuration file, but also quite easy to go pretty far just dropping commands from a text file into Powershell. Here's a fairly good example, all of which may not be useful every day, but I do think every Windows person should be familiar with the one section "Capture a Custom Windows Image Using DISM". This is what you do once you have gotten the OS settings the way you want and have installed your needed apps. You may have already accomplished that much on your Windows PC. A WIM of that is really just a backup of your present "golden" image for future deployment or recovery: https://woshub.com/create-custom-windows-image-preinstalled-apps/ https://woshub.com/create-custom-windows-image-preinstalled-... You can redeploy the WIM file to an empty formatted partition using the DISM.exe /Apply-Image command. Also, a couple other DISM users and how they utilize its capabilities: https://matthewhard.com/windows-command-line-dism https://matthewhard.com/windows-command-line-dism https://4sysops.com/archives/create-a-customized-windows-10-image-using-powershell-and-hyper-v/ https://4sysops.com/archives/create-a-customized-windows-10-... In Windows Education or Enterprise versions you could also enable the Unified Write Filter which can discard all per-session changes rather than having them written to the disk. This may or may not be used to keep the golden image from allowing persistent changes once deployed. Perhaps it would be a good idea if Goldboot included the ability to handlle WIM files itself, or especially to make viable WIM files from Linux installs.