That’s all well and good, but many of these Windows machines were headless or used by extremely non-technical people - think tills at your supermarket or airport check-in desks. Worse, some of these installations were running in the cloud, so console access would have been tricky.
The cloud systems would have been a problem. Any local systems, a non-technical user, could have easily done because their IT department could simply tell them, turn on your computer, and when it gets to this screen with these words, press the down arrow key one time and press enter, and your computer will boot normally.
I’m familiar enough with Linux but never used an immutable distro. I recognize the technical difference between what you describe and “go delete a specific file in safe mode”. But how about the more generic statement? Is this much different from “boot in a special way and go fix the problem”? Is any easier or more difficult than what people had to do on windows?
Primarily it’s different because you would not have had to boot into any safe mode. You would have just booted from the last good image from like a day ago and deleted the current image and kept using the computer.
Turn off computer boot from previous day’s image, wipe current day’s image, continue using computer.
That’s all well and good, but many of these Windows machines were headless or used by extremely non-technical people - think tills at your supermarket or airport check-in desks. Worse, some of these installations were running in the cloud, so console access would have been tricky.
The cloud systems would have been a problem. Any local systems, a non-technical user, could have easily done because their IT department could simply tell them, turn on your computer, and when it gets to this screen with these words, press the down arrow key one time and press enter, and your computer will boot normally.
You wildly overestimate the average person’s willingness to do that.
I’m familiar enough with Linux but never used an immutable distro. I recognize the technical difference between what you describe and “go delete a specific file in safe mode”. But how about the more generic statement? Is this much different from “boot in a special way and go fix the problem”? Is any easier or more difficult than what people had to do on windows?
Primarily it’s different because you would not have had to boot into any safe mode. You would have just booted from the last good image from like a day ago and deleted the current image and kept using the computer.
Would still need to be on site.