Mido VS Fido

i ran proxmox with passthru for any vm i wanted to use it on. i had a 2ndary older gpu for main access, and used fluxbox with firefox for the initial setup which i would start x on if i needed graphical interface, i had multi monitors, with multi inputs, so i could switch input after loading vm. This meant i had access to proxmox as headless, or with GUI, There is a software kvm that can be used for swapping mouse/keyboard functionality. After boot once the vm side of things was sorted i could simply qm up ### of vm after logging into cli of headless proxmox. In terms of deciding which OS will boot you can do this via the vm settings option"start on boot", which can be turned on and off whenever, but this would require you know beforehand which os you want next if you plan on shutting down your pc. I basically left mine on, but this isnt always feasible. docker is fine headless and ssh into from your windows/debian instance... or portainer from browser....there are many other container image options in proxmox. For secure DL of windoze iso that doesnt require you already be running windows to access the download section to obtain an iso i used this from inside proxmos ( not technically the best way, but it is what i chose to do - a better way would be via your linux vm, then upload from that via the browser based access to proxmox. hope that helps :) ( **edit -portainer)

fido is what it uses, and can be run on its own, to download any 10 or 11 iso.

For reference, the script that Rufus uses to download these ISOs is of course public, and if you have any doubts as to what it might be doing, you can check its source to confirm that it is doing exactly what it says on the tin, which is download unmodified retail Windows ISOs straight from the Microsoft servers.

https://github.com/pbatard/Fido (the script that Rufus uses to download the ISOs)

Just to add a small correction here: it was. But Microsoft's strengthening of who could access their downloads in January this year means that it's become a major headache (i.e. time sink) to try to fix it so that it works on Windows 7. Which means that, no matter what version of Rufus you're using, and because this is actually a remote script that is being downloaded and executed by Rufus, ISO downloads have already been disabled on Windows 7 on account that if you run the script, it will just prompt you that it is not compatible with Windows 7 and exit.

Online, there is a similar script , albeit more complex that provide loads of options ... That one doesn't work on my first try I don't have the heart to dig in at the moment that's why I poke the community. If I don't get the anwsers I need I will fix it myself, but at the moment, maybe someone has what Im looking for

the developer of rufus also releases the powershell script rufus uses to download windows from microsoft separately, so you don't have to run the entire program if you just want to download isos

GitHub - pbatard/Fido: A PowerShell script to download Windows ISOs or the UEFI Shell

The thing is that, even if https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download does not provide you with a link to access old Windows 10 ISOs, theses ISOs are still being provided by Microsoft if you know how to query its servers. And Rufus uses a 100% Open Source script (called Fido) to do just that.