> It's easy to forget when Windows was the shell, not the OS, and that it was simpler and easier on the system to boot to a minimal state and allow the user to escalate from there.

i don't think it was designed that way, but rather was a function of the way it evolved.

i don't miss the days of windows on top of dos on personal computers, other than perhaps the puzzles that came with installing new hardware or software. freezes and crashes were a fact of daily life and the device driver situation was insane.

and no, it didn't need to be that way. reliable computers did exist at the time. although, to be fair, the pc compatible as an open ecosystem of hardware and software vendors was a whole new model.

I don't know precisely how long Windows was without a command line boot, but Windows Server Core came out with Server 2008, and has been improved on with Nano in recent versions of Server. These both boot to the command line. IIRC Core's "command line" was still using a lightweight window manager just to provide a box around the shell, but Nano doesn't even have that.

With every release the "desktop experience" gets marked more and more as an optional extra you probably don't need, I find that amusingly optimistic but maybe I'm the odd one.

That's because "windows the shell" is a long dead thing that shares little code with NT - whose end user usable versions always booted into graphical mode (outside of installer and emergency console)

> ... with NT - whose end user usable versions always booted into graphical mode (outside of installer and emergency console)

Elaborating on this... the "Windows console" host (csrss.exe, analogous to a tty manager) is actually one of the few core Windows "subsystems" that actually runs as a Win32 usermode service instead of being baked into the NT kernel. Furthermore, up until Windows 8 (when the legacy XDDM[1] was removed), this system actually had the capability to draw a console in VGA text mode, bypassing the graphical session (and most of the rest of the kernel) entirely[2].

As you say, this is probably how most Windows non-graphical modes worked: bring up the VGA driver, skip starting the graphical subsystem, bring up csrss in VGA text mode. That all changed when Windows Vista deprecated XDDM in favor of DWM, which monopolizes access to the pipeline. From that point forward, such "non-graphical" releases (almost?) always bring up a graphical display session and window manager as part of the boot process. The only "non-graphical" thing about these is that they disable a few shell components and services, autostart a console window, and maybe stub out some of the win32 API.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di... [2]: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1243573/Vga-Text-Mode-T...

“Windows the shell” is even longer dead than most people think. Windows 95 and beyond, despite not being based on NT, were fully 32-bit OSes and ran DOS in a VM (but tried very hard to make it seem like it was the other way around, for when apps relied on DOS functionality).

Even win 3.1 did that in a mandatory way with it dropping support for Real mode, and Standard and Enhanced were available for windows 2 already. And Windows applications of that era went through Windows API and Windows drivers, not DOS ones (although windows itself could fallback to DOS drivers in some cases)

Honestly, I can totally relate to this feeling. While reading that same line, I was taken back to being a kid and having to install Windows this way. It's amazing how much time and advancement can make what used to be normal, feel nostalgic. I'm glad to see this kind of "Feature" come back around.

Everything that is old will be new again some day.

What blew my mind is that a generation of kids that rely on Google drives and chromebooks don’t know what directory and file structures are

I have a niece that literally did not know how to turn her Thinkpad off. The selected power profile puts the PC to sleep when the power button is pressed and closing the lid is set to do nothing.

She's part of Gen-Z and I can understand why she doesn't know any better. She spends the majority of her time on phones and tablets, and this is her first genuine PC that she's spent an appreciable amount of time on. I suppose I'm lucky that computers were not easy to use when I was growing up and that I necessarily had to become comfortable using the command-line and toying with the nuts and bolts of how the operating system does things.

You have a niece who didn't know how to turn her ThinkPad off.

Unless she has one of those boutique gender identities.

Whoops, I've got some bad English today. Fixed.

And even people opining that it’s time to do away with them.

I implore you: spend a few days at your local public library offering basic tech support. There's a reason why you see arguments for doing away with the traditional filesystem -- there's a large cohort of users for whom it's genuinely difficult to use.

I would just spend the entire time apologizing to everyone.

This isn’t what we thought would happen …

We didn’t mean for it to be this way …

I’m sorry they’re doing this …

A high percentages of users don't and never did understand file trees and how to navigate them. They find their files by rote repetition and spatial memory. This is how people end up with desktops covered in files and directories—that's how they find stuff, and the notion you can start in one of those directories and move around until you're in one of their other on-the-desktop directories is foreign. It "is" in a particular place on their desktop, in their mind.

I did and do understand file trees and how to navigate them, and I think they aren't good. They are a carryover from the physical world of "a place for everything and everything in its place" which means you need to remember which room and cupboard and shelf everything is, go there, open the cupboard, and get it.

In a computer, it can be "anything you want appears wherever you are, when you need it". This is hugely more convenient. Let the computer deal with storage (and versioning) similar to garbage collection dealing with memory management. Locate on Linux and VoidTools Everything on Windows let you conjour things up without caring where they were stored, and increasingly photo libraries let you search by the content of pictures rather than the filename. Full-text search is also imaginable although on Windows it's not been good enough to use for years.

The idea that the ever-growing list of things I use a computer for should take an ever-growing amount of space in my head to remember where everything is, is a bad idea. "Everything" tells me my comptuer has roughly 1.4 million files; most of them were put there by installers, not directly by me. If I can not-care about the location and storage of ~99% of them, why can't I not-care about the storage arrangement of 100% of them?

>If I can not-care about the location and storage of ~99% of them, why can't I not-care about the storage arrangement of 100% of them?

Because this 1% are files that actually matter.

There's always a more ignorant user. I don't find this argument persuasive. The non-filesystem-centric data storage systems I'm familiar with are far worse. Instead of portable files which you can do with as you please, you're confined to preconceived integrations that developers thought of, like iPhone apps that let you "share" information with other apps.

Computer education (and educators) are often terrible.

I think there is a large part of certain generations who were taught poorly by people who didn’t like or understand computers, so it’s not surprising that people that have poor education have poor understanding of computers.

I've had users get completely lost when their screen res changed and all the icons got rearranged.

I don't think so, everyone I know can use "ls" and "cd" and has Show Desktop Icons off (if using Windows)

Then you only know power users and computer geeks.

And like everyone knew how to use the command line, even if it was at a very basic level.

"Knew".

My parents wrote sequences of commands on a piece of paper that told them how to launch various programs. These were usually captured from manuals or from the output of installation processes (launched by following the manual). They had no idea how to figure any of it out on their own. What's "cd"? No clue. How does the filesystem look? How do you figure out where you are and get to where you need to be? Dunno.

The commands were just magic words to make the computer do the thing you wanted.

"Validation OS spawns X Server with xterm as DE, and supports X11R7 apps"

Basically this is this if it had been Ubuntu, not a “runlevel 3” build of Windows