As we know Windows (at least till Windows 7) was designed to be a GUI based operating system. All applications can safely assume that the windowing subsystem is running.

Windows/Reactos can run native applications without starting the windowing subsystem like usetup during 1st stage setup but of course without having access to Win32 apis as Win32k is not loaded. AFAIK win32k is designed to be the main subsystem and is the responsible of starting the windowing subsystem so my question is … Would be technically possible to have a striped win32k version without the GUI code? + command line enabled winlogon, syssetup etc.. so you can boot and run cli based applications like cmd.exe ? what other parts of the boot process relay on having the GUI running?

It’s more of a design curiosity question rather than a real request

Regards,

Marc