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"Why would anyone choose to run Windows 2008 Server as their desktop OS..."

http://www.win2008workstation.com/

I didn't see anybody else mention it so I guess I will:
There's a whole cult following/whatever around turning a server OS into a workstation. One of the larger sites on this is called Win2008 Workstation. It has a lot of tips that are useful anyway. Apparently it's a very well performing Vista (I haven't tried it yet myself). There's a whole series of steps to getting up and running as a workstation on there, a compatibility list, everything.

Why would anyone choose to run Windows 2008 Server as their desktop OS

Apparently Server cuts out a lot of the bloat: http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/2008/03/16/why-should-i-use-a-server-os-for-my-workstation/

Just for the record, you can game and use Windows 2008 as a client computer all you want - it's far more stable than Vista in any event. My colleague does exactly that (even runs it on his Mac Book Pro). Someone on /. left this link around ages ago http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ which details using the software in such a manner. Judging by the hardware specs I would say this is what the machine is built for.

I'm actually really impressed with it as a workstation OS. It is as fast as XP due to the significantly fewer number of background services running as compared to Vista, with the prettiness and features of Vista (including Direct X 10 for gaming). Vista drivers work just fine. I installed it mostly as a joke after having received it at one of those Heroes Happen Here conferences, but now I don't even boot to my XP partition anymore.

Actually Mr too cowardly to even have an account, I am a Windows repairman who has made his living with MSFT products sine the days of Win3.1 and am pretty fucking tired of seeing the company whose products I service and support pissed down the drain by Mr. "I want to be Apple so damned bad it hurts!" Ballmer. Of course I am not the only one that think Mr. Ballmer should be righteously fired for his incompetence, and as it gets closer to relase date we are seeing that Win7 is looking more and more like "Vista SE" instead of the new direction which was sorely needed in the company.

What we NEED is to go back to the division we had during the WinNT/Win9x days, where the business OS was a low resource backwards compatible OS with low system requirements so you don't need a gamer rig for your secretary. What it appears we will get AGAIN is another bloated as hell giant pig of an OS with more bling than you can shake a stick at because Ballmer wants to be Steve Jobs. But news flash, Steve Ballmer ain't Steve Jobs and Windows ain't OSX. You can run Leopard just fine on 5 year old machines, in fact according to my Mac friends they even run a little FASTER with the new version.

Compare that to Windows where you need a dual core with 3GB of RAM just to keep Vista from feeling like a 486 struggling to run Win98. I mean it is pretty fucking sad when I have WinXP running smooth and easy on a 733MHz with 384MB of PC100 RAM and Vista ran like a dead elephant on my 3.6GHz HT enabled P4 with 2Gb of RAM. The Vista codebase either needs to be stripped down and rebuilt or tossed over their shoulder into the trash. The consumer has spoken and they don't want it. Putting lipstick on the pig ain't gonna turn pork chops into steak and it ain't gonna sell Vista SE...errr Win7 either.

If they are determined to be Apple then put out the "Apple extra bling" edition for the home users and give us "Win2K10 Professional" for the business users that just want to get their work done without the bloat. Otherwise all of the businesses who got burned with Vista are going to start looking elsewhere. Why do you think there are all these sites including on MSDN showing how to make 2K8 into a desktop OS? Because for the enterprise Vista ain't cutting it and neither will Win7.

But believe what you will, but mark my words: Win7 will fail,just as Vista did. Then maybe Ballmer will be fired and we will have a decent OS by Win8. But I can't keep buying copies of XP for my customers for forever and they have made it clear there will be NO Vista for them.

Some people have taken Windows 2008 Server and using it as a workstation because it runs better than Vista. No joke!

Actually I tried this, and it is, indeed, a very big joke. Just like other win2008 workstation believers, I ignored the fact that it uses the same kernel as Vista. Except it was never meant to be a desktop OS. It was nothing but trouble, and making things work properly (as they would have on Vista) was an ongoing chore. For example:

-Vista x64 drivers, which should work, are often "not intended for this platform" and require extra hackery to force them to install. Certain "desktop" features such as bluetooth have no existing drivers for Server 08 and Vista drivers can be kinda hacked, but never really completely work. You may be able to copy over the driver files from an existing Vista box if you can find them all, but often you have to download the sketchy hacked DLLs and INFs from "tweaker" sites.

-Software is often "not intended for this platform" and requires extra hackery to force installation to achieve a not-fully-functional state. Just because it's a server OS, software companies will try to force you to buy the "server" version that costs 3x as much. There is no decent free antivirus software available (on x64 at least). Clamwin was the only thing that would run, and it sucked. Avira Free > all.

-No discernible difference in performance (unless you enable Hyper-V to slow everything down). In fact I think Vista utilizes my hardware better. And games run reliably well on Vista, in contrast with Server 08.

Simply go here and read the list of "tweaks". Oh, look, you can enable wireless networking! Wow, what an achievement! And gaming controllers, another amazing tweak! Turning on Aero (A.K.A. desktop composition A.K.A. graphical hardware acceleration A.K.A. it speeds up your PC if you have a graphics card so why the hell would you not want this?). All the shit that is enabled by default in Vista and that most people would want in a desktop or "workstation" OS requires extra effort to manually enable in win2008. But you might not want some of those features, you say... Then just freaking use Vista and turn them off using the reverse steps of the aforementioned tweak guides.

And there is a COMPATIBILITY LIST for various games. Meaning you usually have to dick around with each individual game to even get it to attempt to run. Fallout3 froze up everytime for me in the first scene of the game and was not playable at all, even for 2 minutes. This is actually what made me go back to Vista once and for all.

There is NO REASON to run Server 2008 on a desktop unless you also want to use IIS or some kind of activedirectory gobbledygook. I'd recommend just using Linux in a VM for your server needs. Hyper-V, you say? Hyper-V sucks and you do not want it. It will not acceptably run any decent Linux distro, as it's only "accelerated" for Microsoft guest machines (i.e. no Hyper-V tools for anyone else! except maybe Novell...). VMWare workstation is considerably faster than Hyper-V even with all its fancy hypervisory crap. Turning Hyper-V on slows the whole machine down because even the host must run underneath the stupid hypervisor. That's the definition of a hypervisor, I guess, but in that situation should there even really BE a host OS? With Hyper-V, Server 2008 acts as a "host" that has full access to the hardware and the "guest" OS'es can't even access a freaking USB port or create sound. Like VMWare workstation, but much more limited. Shouldn't all the VMs have equally shared access to resources, or have certain resources delegated to certain VMs through user configuration? Why else should there be a hypervisor between the hardware and the OS? Shouldn't the guests run *faster* i

Some people have taken Windows 2008 Server and using it as a workstation because it runs better than Vista. No joke!

Actually I tried this, and it is, indeed, a very big joke. Just like other win2008 workstation believers, I ignored the fact that it uses the same kernel as Vista. Except it was never meant to be a desktop OS. It was nothing but trouble, and making things work properly (as they would have on Vista) was an ongoing chore. For example:

-Vista x64 drivers, which should work, are often "not intended for this platform" and require extra hackery to force them to install. Certain "desktop" features such as bluetooth have no existing drivers for Server 08 and Vista drivers can be kinda hacked, but never really completely work. You may be able to copy over the driver files from an existing Vista box if you can find them all, but often you have to download the sketchy hacked DLLs and INFs from "tweaker" sites.

-Software is often "not intended for this platform" and requires extra hackery to force installation to achieve a not-fully-functional state. Just because it's a server OS, software companies will try to force you to buy the "server" version that costs 3x as much. There is no decent free antivirus software available (on x64 at least). Clamwin was the only thing that would run, and it sucked. Avira Free > all.

-No discernible difference in performance (unless you enable Hyper-V to slow everything down). In fact I think Vista utilizes my hardware better. And games run reliably well on Vista, in contrast with Server 08.

Simply go here and read the list of "tweaks". Oh, look, you can enable wireless networking! Wow, what an achievement! And gaming controllers, another amazing tweak! Turning on Aero (A.K.A. desktop composition A.K.A. graphical hardware acceleration A.K.A. it speeds up your PC if you have a graphics card so why the hell would you not want this?). All the shit that is enabled by default in Vista and that most people would want in a desktop or "workstation" OS requires extra effort to manually enable in win2008. But you might not want some of those features, you say... Then just freaking use Vista and turn them off using the reverse steps of the aforementioned tweak guides.

And there is a COMPATIBILITY LIST for various games. Meaning you usually have to dick around with each individual game to even get it to attempt to run. Fallout3 froze up everytime for me in the first scene of the game and was not playable at all, even for 2 minutes. This is actually what made me go back to Vista once and for all.

There is NO REASON to run Server 2008 on a desktop unless you also want to use IIS or some kind of activedirectory gobbledygook. I'd recommend just using Linux in a VM for your server needs. Hyper-V, you say? Hyper-V sucks and you do not want it. It will not acceptably run any decent Linux distro, as it's only "accelerated" for Microsoft guest machines (i.e. no Hyper-V tools for anyone else! except maybe Novell...). VMWare workstation is considerably faster than Hyper-V even with all its fancy hypervisory crap. Turning Hyper-V on slows the whole machine down because even the host must run underneath the stupid hypervisor. That's the definition of a hypervisor, I guess, but in that situation should there even really BE a host OS? With Hyper-V, Server 2008 acts as a "host" that has full access to the hardware and the "guest" OS'es can't even access a freaking USB port or create sound. Like VMWare workstation, but much more limited. Shouldn't all the VMs have equally shared access to resources, or have certain resources delegated to certain VMs through user configuration? Why else should there be a hypervisor between the hardware and the OS? Shouldn't the guests run *faster* i

It seems that many people really think there wasn't much recourse for Microsoft putting out such a terrible product in it's initial release of Vista.... This very much so isn't the case.

If we refer to the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems you can see how much of the market has started to diversify since Vista came out. I think it would be safe to assume that the market share of Vista is somewhat inflated due to the fact that Microsoft made it very difficult to get anything but Vista on a regular consumer machine for quite some time, and now most major builders charge a fee ($150 at some!) to "downgrade" Vista to XP.

Since Q1 of 2007, Microsoft has seen both of their largest competitors in the desktop operating system market (Apple & Linux) double their penetration. Will this possibly drive them to bring us a better product? On a side note, Microsoft Server 2008 as a workstation is definitely worth taking a look at. You can download and use it free for 60 days, and a quick look at http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ will give you some pointers on setting it up. There are definitely some things lacking, but it might give you hope that M$ will do something right in their next major release.

The DRM in Vista is all encompassing. If you have ever wondered why file transfers and deletions suffer from slow-downs on your vista box you need look no further than your DRM. The presence of the DRM file scanner is especially noticable if you compare the performance of Server 2008 and vista side by side. The DRM was left out of the server version and the difference is amazing.

This difference is one of the main reasons that I use a 2008 workstation.
http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/

I actually replaced Windows Vista with Windows Server 2008 Standard x64, which thus far has played every game I've thrown at it. It's about 10GB smaller than Vista and, with a few tweaks, performs VERY well. Check out http://www.win2008workstation.com./ If Windows 7 shows the same patented buggy, bloatware approach Microsoft took with Vista, I won't be touching it or any future desktop operating system from Microsoft in the future.

I am actually looking forward to the Windows 7 release.

Another interesting project is the Windows Workstation 2008 project http://www.win2008workstation.com/ which customizes Windows Server 2008 (which is also very modular) for desktop use.

Windows Workstation 2008 also is much faster than Vista http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2008/03/windows_worksta.html

I wonder if Windows 7 is essentially a version of Windows Server 2008 with desktop components and with some of the server components removed.

If that is the case, then we have a great OS from MS.

On Vista, take a look above "free" at "cached", that's how much you actually have free. As for disabling superfetch, yes, you absolutely can do it. Here is a page detailing how to enable superfetch on Sever 2008 (which is Vista based), and if you're technically proficient enough, you should easily be able to use that info to turn superfetch off or (as I actually do) turn it on for only system files (1 and 1 instead of 3 and 3 in the regkeys).