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

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

#51
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the use case for needing to run steam but not individual games? Are you using desktop sharing with an ec2 instance or something?

i'd be happy to hunt DLLs for games instead of installing every damned VCredist and directx package globally.

basically a Proton/NixOS for Windows :)

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

#52
post #38
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot more than you think: * Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games. * Discord is 32-bit.

How come people run these Electron apps separately when they run pretty well as tabs/windows in the browser?

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

#53
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…

[deleted]

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

#54
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

The missing option to never combine taskbar buttons is really bugging me.

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

#55
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seamonkey is still around and works nicely on low spec machines (not sure about 128Mb though) as a step up from NetSurf. You get a graphical email client and news/gopher built in. Also a rudimentary Web page editor. Printing a Web page to pdf is a rough and ready way of getting rich text onto paper. The 'legacy' version of the noscript plug-in will allow selective use of javascript (saves battery and helps with security which might be an issue).

[1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

[2] https://noscript.net/getit/ [scroll down to bottom, note there is no support]

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

#56
post #46
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. > 3D everything That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. > accessibility Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do. > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for…

> That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. I think you have to reason this one out. Your statement, to me, doesn’t hold water. Let’s start with HDR. That requires the content that’s being rendered to have higher bit depth. Not all of this is stored in GPU memory at once, a lot is stored in system RAM and shuffled in and out. Now take fluid animations. The interpolation of positions isn’t done solely on the GPU. It’s…

I've got 8GB of RAM on my GPU.

Could we stop shuffling it out? Do more of the work there, directly?

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

#57

It’s a great exercise but this is akin to Alpine Linux: it works for some things but you wouldn’t use it as your daily driver

Well, Alpine Linux actually works with backward compat (as glibc can be easily installed) and uses a few dozens MiB of RAM.

FWIW, I use Alpine Linux on my pinephone in the form of postmarketOS (an Alpine derivative) with a full-fledged KDE desktop, running Firefox alongside. IOW., you can use it as daily driver just fine, just need to install the respective packages - which naturally makes it use more resources, but even then far from what Windows will use.

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that the premise of this discussion is how Tiny11 credits removing WinSXS as part of the reason they were able to free up the memory, it would appear the article (and OP) disagree.

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

#59
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…

The standards were also a lot lower back then. Modern-day users expect high resolution and color depth for their screens, seamless hardware support no matter what they plug into the machine, i18n with incredibly complex text rendering rather than a fixed size 80x25 text mode with 256 selectable characters, etc. These things take some overhead. We can improve on existing systems (there's no real reason for web browsers to be as complex as they are, a lot of it is pure bells and whistles) but some of that complexity will be there.

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The missing option to never combine taskbar buttons is really bugging me.

Being a pain for me as well, I ended up using apps to fix that like Explorer Patcher, StartAllBack or a registry hack I've just read about.
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