I bought a USB floppy drive specifically to run MenuetOS on a floppy in like 2007, they still sell them.

I remember doing this too, a little bit later. It would churn on the disk for minutes on end, and usually fail. I think I got it to work once or twice.

Floppy disks and drives were plentiful, but scrap in those days. So of course those were the machines I got to play with as a kid at that time. Many of my disks were not in the best condition, or they were some of the post-2000s ones that were low quality to begin with.

I remember people were making various editions of "mini windows" 3.11 on a floppy disk around that time also.

I'd assume you can get USB floppy drives for 3½" disks pretty cheaply. I think I might've even seen that in my BIOS settings as an option.

i would say that some cd burning software has the ability to make the cd bootable by copying syslinux and whatever else you need - or a floppy image. So you could just use the boot part of the CD-R.

however, only one of my machines has a permanent optical drive, so even this is going by the wayside.

now-a-days if i'd personally use this sort of thing for thin clients, with bootp/etc https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/nfs/nfsro... unsure if that guide is correct, i just skimmed it. I've done this before, but not for GUI, for compiler farms (distcc-pump, et al)