On this note, because of the lack of virtualization support in Windows Home, in my small business we're encouraging everyone to get rid of Windows both at home and in the office. They've intentionally crippled Windows Home in a way which impacts us -- we want to support devs doing work from home or on their own hardware. But when their OS can't run Docker, that gets harder. No way we're going to buy Pro licenses for people's home machines just because Microsoft decided to flip a bit in their build scripts and suck even more blood.

Windows Pro is not expensive. That alone can hardly be worth the switch.

All other virtualization software runs fine on Windows Home.

Isn’t this basically a virtual machine, though? I don’t see anything special that you’d need a more expensive version of Windows for. This should be using your processor’s virtualization capabilities, right?

Yeah, but it uses their Hyper-V hypervisor, which is limited to the Pro and Enterprise versions for no reason other than money.

What other reason would there be to put an advanced feature in a more expensive version of something?

Agreed. Every time somebody complains about Microsoft doing business shrewdly and increasing their value to customers, I think "This is wht Linux never captured the desktop."

I don't get it. Linux never captured the desktop because they don't arbitrarily limit security features to people who pay more?

It is basically a virtual machine but note from the article:

- "One of the key enhancements we have made for Windows Sandbox is the ability to use a copy of the Windows 10 installed on your computer, instead of downloading a new VHD image as you would have to do with an ordinary virtual machine." - "we also allow Windows sandbox to use the same physical memory pages as the host for operating system binaries via a technology we refer to as “direct map”" - "More recently, Microsoft has worked with our graphics ecosystem partners to integrate modern graphics virtualization capabilities directly into DirectX and WDDM, the driver model used by display drivers on Windows." (Note: it also works with OpenGL nowadays too)

Maybe you can achieve your workflow needs from Home + free 3rd party virtualization software but if you don't see anything special I'd recommend reading the article more carefully.