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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

#71

Post by grishka »

inglor_cz wrote: post #64
grishka wrote: 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…

"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.

> liberated us from writing specialized desktop apps for various OSes

I use macOS and I very much dislike anything built with cross-platform GUI toolkits, and especially the web stack. And it's always painfully obvious when something is not native. It doesn't behave like the rest of the system. It's not mac-like. It draws its own buttons from scratch and does its own event handling on them instead of using NSButton. I don't want that kind of "liberation". I want proper, native, consistent apps. Most other people probably do too, they just don't realize that or can't put it into words.

The only counter-example out there known to me is IntelliJ-based IDEs. They're built with Swing, but they do somehow feel native enough.

Also, developer experience is not a something users care about. And I'm saying that as a developer myself. Do use fancy tools to make your job easier, sure, but avoid those of them that stay inside your product when you ship it.

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

#72

Post by Dooflegna »

ninkendo wrote: post #58
Someone1234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The article talks about memory savings and storage savings. Removing WinSXS is a storage savings play, not a memory savings play.

Here's the relevant quote:

> Moreover, removing the Windows Component Store (WinSxS), which is responsible for a fair degree of Tiny11’s compactness, means that installing new features or languages isn’t possible.

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

#73

Post by tester756 »

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.

oh, I've changed that right away after W11 update with single reg. change and since that it's fine

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

#74

Post by weinzierl »

api wrote: post #7
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…

My favorite is Geos for the Commodore 64: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system... Obviously there were huge limitations but it shows what can be done. This fit on one 170K floppy and ran on a 1.44mhz 8 bit machine with 64K of RAM. In the 1990s I ran both Linux and Windows on less than 64M of RAM with IDEs, web browsers, games, and more. If I had to guess what were possible today I’d fall back…

For me also the Commodore came to mind. It had 64K RAM and a 64K address range, because other things had to fit in there not all RAM was usable at the same time. Clock frequency of the PAL model was 985kHz (yes KILO), so not even a full MHz.

Yet, I could do

* word processing

* desktop publishing

* working with scanned documents

* spreadsheets

* graphics

* digital painting

* music production

* gaming (even chess)

* programming (besides BASIC and ASM I had a Pascal compiler)

* CAD and 3D design (Giga CAD [1], fascinated me to no end)

* Video creation [2]

For all this tasks there were standalone applications [3] with their own GUI [4]. GEOS was an integrated GUI environment with its own applications and way ahead of its times [5].

It still blows my mind how all this could work.

My first Linux ran on a 386DX with 4M of RAM, but this probably as low as on can get. Even the installer choked on that little RAM and one had to create a swap partition and swapon manually after booting but before the installer ran. In text mode it was pretty usable though, X11 worked and I remember having GNU chess runnning, but it was quite slow.

[1] https://youtu.be/ZEf9XMrc5u8

[2] OK, this one is a bit of a stretch but there actually was Videofox for creating video titles and shopping window animations: https://www.pagetable.com/docs/scanntronik_manuals/videofox....

[3] Some came on extension modules which saved RAM or brought a bit of extra RAM, but we are still talking kilobytes. For examples see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1730

[4] Or sort of TUI if you like; the strict separation of text and graphics mode wasn't a thing in the home computer era.

[5] The standalone apps were still better. So, as advanced GEOS was, I believe it was not used productively much.

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

#75

Post by cratermoon »

djur wrote: post #36
grishka wrote: 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…

> Not everyone needs [accessibility], so it should be an additional installable component for those who do. The UI has to be designed from the ground up to support accessibility.

I'd also like to add that accessibility is not a binary that's either on or off. Parent comment might be thinking of features for people with high disability ratings, but eventually everyone has some level of disability. Some even start of life with one: color blindness, vision impairment. Most people have progressive near vision loss (presbyopia) as they age.

Also, disability may not be permanent. I recently underwent major surgery and for at least a few days afterwards using my cell phone was nearly impossible. I resorted voice control a few times because I did not have the coordination or cognitive function to type. (Aside: cell phones in general are accessibility dumpster fires, but it took a major life event to demonstrate to me how bad it really is.)

So no, accessibility is not just a toggle switch or installable library. In fact, I hope future UI design incorporates some kind of non-intrusive learning and adaptability, such that when the system detects the user continually making certain kinds of errors, the UI will adapt to help.

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

#78

Post by jeroenhd »

mixedCase wrote: post #16
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…

Resolutions and HDR are one area where I think the extra RAM load and increasing application sizes make complete sense. However, my monitors run at 1080p, don't do HDR, and my video files are rncoded at a standard colour depth. Despite all this, the standalone RAM usage has increased over the years.

Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility framework with subpar but usable tooling built in, and excellent commercial applications to make use of the existing API, all the way back in Windows XP. Backwards compatibility hacks such as loading old memory manager behaviour and allocating extra buffer space for known buggy applications may take more RAM but don't increase any requirements.

Inagree that requirements have grown but not by the amount reflected in standby CPU and memory use. Don't forget that we've also gained near universal SSD availability, negating the need for RAM caches in many circumstances. And that's just ignoring the advance in CPU and GPU performance since the Windows XP days, when DOS was finally killed off and the amount of necessary custom tailored assembly drastically dropped.

When I boot a Windows XP machine, the only thing I can say I'm really missing as a user is application support. Alright, the Windows XP kernel was incredibly insecure, so let's upgrade to Windows 7 where the painful Vista driver days are behind us and the kernel has been reshaped to put a huge amount of vulnerable code in userspace. What am I missing now? Touchscreen and pen support works, 4k resolutions and higher are supported perfectly fine, almost all modern games still run.

The Steam hardware survey says it all. The largest target audience using their computer components the most runs one or two 1080p monitors, has 6 CPU cores and about 8GB of RAM. Your average consumer doesn't need or use all of that. HiDPI and HDR are a niche and designing your OS around a niche is stupid.

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

#79

Post by SSLy »

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?

sure https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/sys...

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

#80

Post by wkat4242 »

haunter wrote: 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

LTSC is no longer debloated. The latest version comes with the same crapware, Windows app store, "recommended" Microsoft account, telemetry that can't be turned off etc.

It's just a stable version frozen in time but heralding it as the bloat-free alternative is no longer true.

I have access to it through work and I gave it a spin recently but it's no longer what it used to be.

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