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

tomshardware.com

21–30 of 415 posts

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

#21

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?

Caching frequently used apps for snappiness.

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

#22
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…

> has not grown in complexity by four orders of magnitude in 20 years.

How about all those sandboxes, protections and mitigations?

Nowadays people care about security waaay more than people did 20-30 years ago.

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

#23

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…

Um. Where else do you need it to run in 2GB but embedded? I think the article is informative, fair and correct.

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

#25
post #19

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…

[deleted]

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

#26
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.

Tell that to the person on a fixed income who has to invest in an expensive new machine because their 2015 laptop (which still has a whopping 4 GB of memory and a CPU that would have been top-of-the-line twenty years ago) has become unusably slow.

Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.

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

#27
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…

Well, other operating systems are still relatively decent at this. My main Linux install eats ~250 MiB of RAM after startup, and I've spent exactly zero amount of time on that, so it can be trimmed down further. That's on a system with 32 GiB of RAM — if you have less RAM, it will eat even less since page tables and various kernel buffers will be smaller.

FreeBSD can be comfortably used on systems with 64 MiB of RAM for solving simple tasks like a small proxy server. It has always been good at this — back in the day cheap VPS often used it (and not Linux) precisely because of its small memory requirements.

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

#28
post #8

Not 11 but the "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021" is significantly better if you want an (official) full fledged Windows OS without the bloat. I'm using that on the Steam Deck w/ dual booting and it's perfect

What is the difference between IoT and normal LTSC?

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

#29
post #3

Windows 11 has some nice features but I am on 10 until they fix some things.

Which? I've only noticed lack of right click on taskbar, which sucks, but I don't see other things that need fix

Can I put the taskbar along the left side of the screen yet?

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

#30
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…

more features but not sure features i want or need, nor in fun interactions

that said 2GB is acceptable considering the state of everything

not saying i wouldn't like to have QNX class back

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