Elephant in the room?

[DrHariSeldon]

WinApps is amazing, I wish I could truly comprehend all the hard work that went into this project! Great Job everyone!!

For a long time (pre-W10's OS-as-a-Service) I was a heavy user of VMware Workstation's Unity: I had my various Windows apps "containerized" into 1 of 4 W7 VMs. It all worked GREAT thankfully I had enough ram, cpu, and storage for the VM overhead.

Sometime after W10 came out I repurposed an cheap-as-dirt EOL W7 tablet runing W10 for my at-home WiFi sumatraPDF ebook reader
(it never left my private network, it's static IP was firewalled from internet access, its vlan was isolated from my production network, and I did a great job permently breaking W10's no-user-control-windows-updates... it only ever accessed an INTRAnet webdav to download pdf/epub documents)

Everything worked flawlessly and great!

Then 7 or 8 months later, W10 on my tablet went into limp-home-mode because it had failed to 'handshake' with the W10 Microsoft Servers for too long... and I did not want to waste my time fixing my wsus damage.

As I see it, here is the elephant in the room: the full desktop Windows OS:
-- Updates
-- Microsoft Edicts of upgrades
-- System Resources for a full WinOS running all the time
-- Security concerns because you cannot keep W10/11 disconnected from the internet for ever with limp-home-mode... (or can you?)

Though I never deliberately tested it, I suspect older OS's can be offline (from Microsoft) for a really long time: W7, W8x, and Server20x3/20x8/2012x... maybe Server 2016/19/22.

The supreme ultimate daydream would be 'containerized' app virtualization that can be run in linux [ideally cross platform, but one dream at a time]. Windows apps do not need an entire full blown desktop operating system to function. I remember windows desktop Cameyeo, I still have some old Cameyo app containers that still work in W10/W11.

Has any open source project ever attempted virtualization of apps on a containerized approach?