Technology

Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”

It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.

Basically, a playbook is a set of instructions or baselines for how you want the system to look/be setup, and the provisioning tool will engage in however many tasks are required to configure the system to your specifications. I played around with something similar with PowerShell DSC, and its pretty cool to be able to eliminate config drift when it checks against the config and remediates any changes that weren't updated in the playbook.

Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

• Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
• Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
• Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
• Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
• Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
• Telemetry refers to the data harvesting apparatus. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad but it is easily abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is a precaution.
• MS = Microsoft
• OSS = Open Source Software
• Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, software and file system access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
• Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing only what they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, the resources they need, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge the only equivalent for Windows to date is Wine and its successors like Proton.

Many of these concepts are IT-related, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple to use if you pick one of the premade playbooks. (The AtlasOS playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

Edit: added docker