That is an option with servers, but not with "desktop" computers (in my case, custom industrial PCs with touch interfaces).
There is no really great deployment story. In the very best case, you have to connect a keyboard, a PxE LAN cable, change some things in the bios, and select the OS you want to clone. But creating the image in the first place takes the better part of a day. Another option is to maybe clone the SSD beforehand. It gets more complicated if you have to flash a certain bios, change settings, and so on. Ideally, we'd just want to connect one cable bundle and "pressure tank" the new system with OS and configuration in a couple of minutes.
This is for the PCs that we sell, the story for the office laptops we use is even worse. There are good tools in the Windows world for deployment, but they all seem geared for installations of 1000s of computers. What if the office you manage (on the side of your normal work) just has 20? There is little point setting up SCCM, WSUS, or newer stuff like Autopilot (which seems pretty cool, but I couldn't figure out how to install MS office with the user's license, or how to install an ERP from Microsoft themselves... that should be 1-click or 1 line of code if you offer such a solution).
What I'd really like is a mixture of Ansible or Puppet with a stupid simple monitoring GUI. Then I'd be able to say
boot from USB, hit a few keys, and come back to a deployed PC later. AND be able to see the PC in a simple desktop app, where I can ping it and see who's logged in, what updates are missing etc..
You're talking about Windows though. This topic is about Linux. I don't pretend to specialise in automation on Windows like I do with Linux but what experiences I do have managing Windows instances have all been painful (regardless of whether they were a desktop or server) because the problems require a completely different mindset to solve and half the time those solutions are only semi-effective. So I do feel your pain there.
For what it's worth, I've had some success with Powershell for package management and domain management, and tools like Clonezilla / Norton Ghost for managing images on small to medium sized fleets of machines (again, both desktop and server). There are also a plethora tools that can interrogate what machines are on a given network, the software installed and their patch levels -- but most of them are not going to be free. However there definitely are alternative options to SCCM and WSUS if they're too "enterprisey" for your needs (I've used a few different ones but I'm afraid I can't recall the names of the more effective solutions in terms of ease of us and features vs license fee).
I agree, Windows is the main difficulty here, but we also ship (Desktop) Ubuntu. It's much more amenable to command line tools, but probably still nowhere close to what people working with disposable VMs on the cloud are used to.
There is no really great deployment story. In the very best case, you have to connect a keyboard, a PxE LAN cable, change some things in the bios, and select the OS you want to clone. But creating the image in the first place takes the better part of a day. Another option is to maybe clone the SSD beforehand. It gets more complicated if you have to flash a certain bios, change settings, and so on. Ideally, we'd just want to connect one cable bundle and "pressure tank" the new system with OS and configuration in a couple of minutes.
This is for the PCs that we sell, the story for the office laptops we use is even worse. There are good tools in the Windows world for deployment, but they all seem geared for installations of 1000s of computers. What if the office you manage (on the side of your normal work) just has 20? There is little point setting up SCCM, WSUS, or newer stuff like Autopilot (which seems pretty cool, but I couldn't figure out how to install MS office with the user's license, or how to install an ERP from Microsoft themselves... that should be 1-click or 1 line of code if you offer such a solution).
What I'd really like is a mixture of Ansible or Puppet with a stupid simple monitoring GUI. Then I'd be able to say
boot from USB, hit a few keys, and come back to a deployed PC later. AND be able to see the PC in a simple desktop app, where I can ping it and see who's logged in, what updates are missing etc..