Everything you've listed is addressable by enterprise users in an AD environment. I.E., Microsoft's real customers. Using a copy of Windows 10 with no Cortana, Auto-updates, Groove, or Windows Defender right now.
Yes. If you want that control, all you have to do is buy a subscription [0]. $7 per month isn't that much to be able to control your own computer is it? That's only $84 per year or $252 every 3 years -- it's practically a discount for buying an upgrade every 3 years!
It comes with Office365 too! I'd totally buy this for the added control over home edition, but it looks like Microsoft only sells this license in bulk to big businesses in my region. Then again...it turns out that you can upgrade to enterprise without a valid key [1] and that there are no real penalties for doing this [2]. So, shrug, I guess they don't want my money - and I'm not going to use an OS that turns me into a mineable dataset.
I don't unfortunately and I haven't got around to trying it yet. If you (or anyone else on HN) finds something that works, could you post the link here?
What is "AD environment"? Sounds like maybe what I want.
I want no updates or changes of any kind without my knowledge. Indeed, before any change, I want to backup the relevant boot partition so that I can restore it if any changes are harmful or doubtful.
For Cortana, when I looked at it, everything it has I have a lot better with just my favorite programmable text editor and a few simple macros.
Uh, to reply, I have to edit my post! So, here is my reply!
My now very old and crude understanding is that Active Directory is a standard part of Windows Server and plays the role of essentially the old MIT system Kerberos for authentication.
My concern is that ASAP I need to take my Web site software currently in alpha test and have it go live. For that, for maybe just a few, first users, I could use just my development computer running Windows 7 Professional. But, also on that computer I intend to have at least one bootable partition with Windows Server.
So, with Windows Server, I could be running Microsoft's Active Directory. Fine with me.
Then that means that somehow all my bootable partitions with Windows 7 or Windows Server will not get updates or changes without my explicit permission? Hope so.
Or maybe your point is just that the automatic updates don't apply to Windows Server? I would believe so.
If you weren't familiar enough with Microsoft's products to immediately recognize that the acronym "AD" within the context of Microsoft anything, means Active Directory, then you are thousands of dollars, and possibly multiple years away from moving in that direction.
I know a lot of the fundamental concepts in computing, many from when they were nearly new. I knew nearly all the concepts long before Windows, 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, or NT. I didn't learn the concepts in the context of Microsoft or Windows. So, I learned the concepts before I ever saw any Microsoft acronyms.
E.g., I first learned about Kerberos from one of the first papers about it, an article in Scientific American. I learned about RSA and public keys, of course, usable with Kerberos, near the beginning. I still have the source code for an early version of Kerberos. And I learned about and used authentication, capabilities, and access control lists back not too far from their origins in Multics. Sure, later IBM called some of that Resource Access Control Facility (RACF) -- saw some of that, too.
So, at one point Microsoft in Windows Server wanted some authentication, capabilities, with encryption, etc. so borrowed Kerberos and got Active Directory. Fine. So far I've never seen even a single word of Microsoft's Active Directory documentation but likely already understand nearly all the main purposes and core ideas. For working with the actual code, I suspect that I can get the dozen or so operations I need with examples and documentation and, then, be okay on Active Directory.
Uh, in a very significant sense, Microsoft and Windows are an example of the old biology ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, each organism as it develops from fertilization goes through stages that closely repeat how the species evolved. Well, as Windows grew from Windows 95 to Windows 10, it stayed close to the development of the core ideas in computing, e.g., multiple virtual memory, demand paged, protected, with gate segments, etc., embedded operating systems with an hierarchical file system. They stayed close to the ideas in the Mach kernel. And they are staying close to the ideas in virtual machine. Some of the hardware ideas include instruction caches, data caches, multi-way set associative caches, cache invalidates, page-segment tables, address translation look aside buffers, micro-code, instruction pipelines, speculative execution, out of order execution, parallel execution, etc. I understood all of those well long before I ever touched a PC.
I have a friend with a background a little less than mine who got good with Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange, running an e-mail server, etc. all fairly quickly. So can I.
There is an issue: I'm trying to be successful with my startup. For that, I need to learn some about computing. Okay. But I'm not trying to be a broadly competent computer professional. The difference is, I just want to know enough for my startup and am not trying to know enough for everything everyone else might encounter. So, a good computer professional can be eager to learn everything in sight (early in my career, I did a lot of that). But as a startup entrepreneur, I want to minimize how much I learn. Significant difference.
Okie doke, well, the main point being that Microsoft usually doesn't just want you to buy one thing and call it a day.
Ya gotta buy the server-class license for the OS. And then ya gotta buy a quantity of client licenses for the Professional/Business version of the OS. And then they all need some applications, and then those applications need some non-OS-application server software. And then those application servers need isolation, so each one needs a server OS license of its own, and then, and then, and then...
Setting up windows servers takes time. Not because it's particularly difficult, or technical, but because you are not in control of the process. The software distribution is in control, and will try to phone home. You will wait while the software tries to contact the Microsoft mothership, and the software will not ask you whether such activities are even possible. It will time-out network connections, and possibly refuse to work, before even prompting you about skipping steps. You may need to make phone calls. These are facts about using Microsoft as part of enterprise infrastructure in a business environment.
The entry-level prices for what you seek are here:
You will spend more than that. By the time you feel comfortable with your configuration, it will be time to upgrade, introducing forced changes to your process, and you will spend more money. You will spend more money on more Microsoft products, and also on peripheral costs which may not be expected but will likely be driven by compatibility choices.
And by the way, Windows 7? They will not even sell you that anymore. Mocrosoft's goal in life is to retire that version of their operating system, and require migration to newer versions.
More to the point, though, all of this was their old business model, more than a decade ago. They are no long interested in this sort of sales pitch, unless you are The Government, or a Financial Institution. Nowadays, they want your servers on their cloud (Azure). It may be cheaper doing that. If you are an addict, already hooked on Microsoft, and there's no going back, consider exploring those options.
If you must be in possession of physical hardware, and if you must run stand-alone systems for the purposes of testing and developing your latest thing, Microsoft gets very expensive very fast, in terms of both time and money.
