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De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

tomshardware.com

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Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#11

Post by Semaphor »

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

This removes WinSxS. That's fine for embedded, since you'd just package the DLLs you need with any executables you want to run, but trying to run this as a general purpose OS is a fools' errand. Calling WinSxS "bloat" when that "bloat" is allowing 30+ years of backwards compatibility (and a lot of stuff will break) is creative by the article's author for sure. Nothing wrong with Tiny11 though, if you know what it is…

In their defense, they also don’t recommend running it on anything that can actually run normal Win 11.

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#13

Post by causality0 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

This removes WinSxS. That's fine for embedded, since you'd just package the DLLs you need with any executables you want to run, but trying to run this as a general purpose OS is a fools' errand. Calling WinSxS "bloat" when that "bloat" is allowing 30+ years of backwards compatibility (and a lot of stuff will break) is creative by the article's author for sure. Nothing wrong with Tiny11 though, if you know what it is…

Calling WinSxS "bloat" when that "bloat" is allowing 30+ years of backwards compatibility (and a lot of stuff will break) is creative by the article's author for sure.

Taking up a lot of space on your drives for data to maintain backwards compatibility makes sense. Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM?

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#14

Post by bArray »

Aerroon wrote: post #9
abraxas wrote: post #6

Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…

I remember taking Windows XP to below 100 MB of RAM usage.

I remember needing to get Windows XP under 64MB of RAM so that I could run some photo editing software. XP was relatively feature complete, I don't think Windows currently ships with 32x the features of XP (64MB vs 2048MB minimum).

Linux with a lightweight GUI for example can still run okay with just 128MB. I ran Debian with LXDE on an old IBM T22, and it worked perfectly well. Running Firefox was a problem (but did eventually work), but something more stripped down like NetSurf or Dillo is blazingly fast.

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#15

Post by Someone1234 »

causality0 wrote: post #13
Someone1234 wrote: post #4

This removes WinSxS. That's fine for embedded, since you'd just package the DLLs you need with any executables you want to run, but trying to run this as a general purpose OS is a fools' errand. Calling WinSxS "bloat" when that "bloat" is allowing 30+ years of backwards compatibility (and a lot of stuff will break) is creative by the article's author for sure. Nothing wrong with Tiny11 though, if you know what it is…

Calling WinSxS "bloat" when that "bloat" is allowing 30+ years of backwards compatibility (and a lot of stuff will break) is creative by the article's author for sure. Taking up a lot of space on your drives for data to maintain backwards compatibility makes sense. Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM?

> Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM?

There's no need, which is why it doesn't.

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#16

Post by mixedCase »

abraxas wrote: post #6

Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…

Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves, email clients have stayed mostly the same at least except for the part that they also ship a browser and few of us even use 'em anymore! Some of those features combine exponentially in complexity and hardware requirements, and some optimizations will trade memory for speed.

Not going to defend particular implementations, but requirements? Those have definitely grown more than we give them credit.

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#17

Post by ShaneMcGowan »

abraxas wrote: post #6

Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…

We don’t need to worry about memory efficiency until we stop getting gains via hardware improvements. For now developers can just slap a web app into some chromium based wrapper, make sure their code doesn’t have any n^2 in it and you’re good to go.

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#19

Post by 8note »

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

This removes WinSxS. That's fine for embedded, since you'd just package the DLLs you need with any executables you want to run, but trying to run this as a general purpose OS is a fools' errand. Calling WinSxS "bloat" when that "bloat" is allowing 30+ years of backwards compatibility (and a lot of stuff will break) is creative by the article's author for sure. Nothing wrong with Tiny11 though, if you know what it is…

how much backwards compatability do i neee nowadays?

my laptop only needs to run a few things:

browser vscode steam the microsoft drawing app some office stuff sublime discord

which all update pretty regularly.

the age of the desktop app has been replaced by the age of the browser and electron based apps. i can imagine businesses who built their own set ups back in the age of the desktop app being stuck with it, but for the most part i dont think i used windows' backwards compatability anymore

Re: De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

#20

Post by stainablesteel »

bsuvc wrote: post #10

How does this compare to a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu?

i used to run arch on a laptop with only 2 gb of ram and had zero problems for years, it was useful because it got great battery life

memory was basically a non-issue unless i was trying to compile a large package, i don't recall the precise baseline it had after boot but it was probably around 12-25%

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