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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

#61

Post by darknavi »

zozbot234 wrote: post #59
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…

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 browser…

And they also expect their programs from 20 years ago still run.

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

#62

Post by RamRodification »

tester756 wrote: post #24
debacle wrote: 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

Right-click menu on files missing all the actually useful stuff is a huge annoyance for me. I think there's some registry change that somewhat brings it all back, but IIRC it doesn't always give you the full menu anyway.

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

#63

Post by dagmx »

doubled112 wrote: post #56
dagmx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Unintuitively, your two questions are somewhat at odds with each other.

The more work you do on the GPU, the more you need to shuffle because the more GPU memory you’d use AND the more state you’d need to check back on the CPU side, causing sync stalls. It’s not insurmountable, and macOS puts a lot more of its work on the GPU for example. Windows is a little more conservative in that regard.

Here are some more confounding factors:

- Every app needs one or more buffers to draw into. Especially with hidpi screens this can eat up memory quick. The compositor can juggle these to try and get some efficiency, but it can’t move all the state to the GPU due to latency.

- you also need to deal with swap memory. You’d ultimately need to shuffle date back to the system ram and then to disk and back which is fairly slow. It’s much better theoretically on APUs though.

Theoretically, APUs stand to solve a lot of these issues because they blur the lines of GPU and CPU memory.

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

#64

Post by inglor_cz »

grishka wrote: post #31
mixedCase wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

"No one asked for this. My personal opinion"

You didn't ask. It is, as you say, your personal opinion.

From my POV, current Web is fine and the fact that browsers are powerful liberated us from writing specialized desktop apps for various OSes. I am much happier writing a Web UI than hacking together Win32 or Qt-based apps. Or, God forbid, AVKON Symbian OS UI. That was its own circle of hell.

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

#65

Post by jeroenhd »

grishka wrote: post #31
mixedCase wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I want touchscreen support on Windows. But guess what? Multitouch worked in Windows 7. If Windows still supported theming basic controls then Microsoft could enable touch screen support in most applications by setting a theme, similar to how they enhance contrast if you enable that feature.

I understand that bigger stuff and better graphics involve more RAM and the switch to 64 bit doubled the pointer sizes (which is why you can't meaningfully run Windows 7 x64 on 1GB of RAM like you can the 32 bit version) but with 4GB of system RAM you should be able to fit everything in and then some.

You actually can, as various Linux distributions demonstrate. The algorithms and APIs aren't as well developed, but better window control/accessibility APIs don't take up more than a megabyte of RAM.

People do ask for many Microsoft features, such as the appification of the interface and the Microsoft store. Just because you didn't ask for it, doesn't mean it's not necessary. However, Microsoft has known for years how to build and implement those requests in a much more compact environment.

My take is still the same old cynical one: as resources become cheaper, developers become lazier. I don't want to go back to the days of racing the beam with carefully planned instructions but the moment Electron gained any popularity the ecosystem went too far. "Yes but our customers want features more than a small footprint" is the common excuses I hear, but that's ignoring all the people calling various support channels or just being miserable with their terribly slow machine.

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

#66

Post by grishka »

dagmx wrote: post #49
grishka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don’t use directly, it’s a common thread between all your comments, and it’s a disservice to both the points you’re trying to make and the people who actually use those things . Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion…

My point is that accessibility being a thing shouldn't ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. Apps don't need to be made aware whether some control has focus because the user has pressed the tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen reader, or because of some other assistive technology. Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 — and that is exposed to apps.

Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to be designed from the ground up to support them.

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

#67

Post by RamRodification »

LinuxBender wrote: post #2

Previous submission [1] Is there a repo with the scripts and tools required to build these images from a bog standard Windows 11 ISO? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647699

Curious as well. Installing a Windows version that some guy has messed with is out of the question for me. Maybe he has lots of cred on the scene and I'm overly cautious, I dunno.

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

#68

Post by bombolo »

8note wrote: post #19
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…

> steam

Do you want steam to actually run any game? :D

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

#69

Post by KronisLV »

dagmx wrote: post #49
grishka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don’t use directly, it’s a common thread between all your comments, and it’s a disservice to both the points you’re trying to make and the people who actually use those things . Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion…

> Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen reader.

I wonder where the current status quo lies in regards to both desktop computing and web applications/sites. Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or worst, how do they compare? How have they evolved over time? Which web frameworks/libraries give one the best starting point to iterate upon, say, component libraries and how well they integrate with something like React/Angular/Vue?

Sadly I'm not knowledgeable enough at the moment to answer all of those in detail myself, but there are at least some tools for web development.

  For example, this seems to have helpful output: https://accessibilitytest.org 
  There was also this one, albeit a bit more limited: https://www.accessibilitychecker.org
  I also found this, but it seemed straight up broken because it couldn't reach my site: https://wave.webaim.org/
  From what I can tell, there are many tools like this: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/
And yet, while we talk about accessibility occasionally, we don't talk about how good of a starting point certain component frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap vs PrimeFaces/PrimeNG/PrimeVue, Ant Design, ...) provide us with, or how easy it is to setup build toolchains for automated testing and reporting of warnings.

As for OS related things, I guess seeing how well Qt, GTK and other solutions support the OS functionality and what that functionality even is is probably a whole topic in of itself.

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

#70

Post by AlfeG »

RamRodification wrote: post #62
tester756 wrote: post #24

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

Right-click menu on files missing all the actually useful stuff is a huge annoyance for me. I think there's some registry change that somewhat brings it all back, but IIRC it doesn't always give you the full menu anyway.

There is an Explorer Patcher tool on Github. It's doing pretty much great work for fixing Win11 issues!
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