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Comment by coreyh14444 | Hacker News Reader

Windows already has the Windows Sandbox which is for exactly this purpose. You can spin it up in seconds, mess with it and when you close it, everything is gone.

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Neat to learn about that. Still, it’s a new feature with Windows 10 and requires that the host OS be a Pro or Enterprise edition of Windows 10 or 11 (and for Enterprise it also cares about the licensing). Hardware requirements also exist.

The downloadable VMs don’t even require that your host OS be Windows or that you already have a Windows license, and they’ve been offered since long before Windows Sandbox existed.

I tried to like windows Sandbox, but I think it would be a killer if it would be like docker/podman with a proper GUI and desktop: you could snapshot it (no need for branching, and stuff, just persist it), and continue your work in it later. Keeping VMs around and tending them is a nuisance, but I have some software i'd prefer to only use in an isolated persistent sandbox (crapware for industrial control stuff, for example). Having lots of VMs around for this is really cumbersome.

It (Sandbox) worked okay for shady car repair handbook .ISO salvaged from the net for a long EOL'd unsupported model. Hope I'm not in a botnet... but I could find the repair instructions :D

Is it reliable? A VM is fully isolated, apart from maybe network and IO.

It's Hyper-V under the hood.

Curious to know which tradeoffs Microsoft chose to have sandbox boot this quickly

It's actually restoring state from a snapshot so it doesn't need to fully boot. There's some great technical details at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...

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