De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by dagmx » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #66

dagmx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 configur…

Your point about “apps don’t need to be made aware” is precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system UI framework.

Accessibility is also not something that is just a binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that overrides the apps rendering. There’s just so many levels of nuance here. It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system

If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple developer videos on accessibility to see why it’s not just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great work for accessibility too , they just don’t have much content up to delve into it.

As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it doesn’t, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless. Apple for example didn’t redo their UI for accessibility, however Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs.

Also , again, I’d point out that you’re purposefully trying to trivialize something you don’t use.

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

#82

Post by matthew-wegner » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #71

inglor_cz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.…

Hold up. It's been ~14 years since Apple shipped machines with 2GB of memory as base their base model.

macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader support, as well as all of the things you're complaining about in your original comment at the top of this thread. Clearly those things are absolutely gobbling memory, and yet you don't seem to connect the dots that they're directly contributing to high memory requirements of macOS?

I mean, 8GB on stock machines today is barely manageable. You can't buy a Mac with less than 8GB today; you can't even buy a phone with 2GB or less. I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against high-memory bloat in computing today.

p.s. I say this as someone who uses macOS as their daily driver and has for a very long time

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

#83

Post by haunter » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #80

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.

>LTSC is no longer debloated. The latest version

Which one? Or I guess it's not a public release?

I have installed IoT 2021 (Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 Version 21H2) like 3 weeks ago there was nothing, no App Store, less telemetry (there is some but significantly less than on the "normal" Windows versions, but I reinstalled the App Store so maybe because of that)

*Edited the wording

It looks like this as a fresh install https://ia904606.us.archive.org/11/items/en-us_windows_10_io...

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

#84

Post by speg » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #50

8note wrote: 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…

Isn't it interesting that both you and I frequently use Sublime and VS Code? Why can't VS Code kill off Sublime? It's interesting to me where a text editor like Sublime can't be a preferable IDE, but an IDE also isn't a preferable text editor?

Sublime is, well, Sublime.

Every time I try VS Code I just can’t commit. There’s a bit too much going on and it never feels as tight as Sublime.

I did just get a new Windows machine, so maybe I should try it on that.

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

#85

Post by dagmx » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #69

dagmx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or worst, how do they compare?

Hands down macOS/iOS are the leaders here with Cocoa/SwiftUI/UIKit etc (ultimately basically the same). The OS also has many hooks to allow third party frameworks to tie in to the accessibility.

Windows is second in my opinion. Microsoft does some good work here but it’s not as extensive in terms of integrations and pervasiveness due to how varied their ecosystem is now. They do however do excellent work on the gaming side with their accessibility controllers.

In terms of UI frameworks, Qt is decent but not great . Electron actually does well here because it can piggy back off the work done for web browsers. Stuff like Imgui etc rank at the bottom because they don’t expose the tree to the OS in a meaningful way.

I can’t speak to web frameworks. In theory it shouldn’t matter as long as the components are good. Many node frameworks try and install a11y as a package to encourage better accessibility.

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

#86

Post by anthk » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

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…

>That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM.

Compiz ran fine with a 128MB GPU and 512MB of RAM.

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

#87

Post by karmakaze » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

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.

Then that's where it started to double. I was running Windows NT 3.51 running Visual C++ on 32MB.

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

#88

Post by anthk » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #27

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…

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…

OpenWRT Linux with Musl ran fine under 48MB of RAM, 7-8MB running. Modern GNU/Linux, I mean.

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

#89

Post by anthk » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #47

ShaneMcGowan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a netbook from around 2010. It has 2 GB of RAM and a single core Atom processor. It boots to a full Linux GUI desktop in a minute or so. It can handle CAD software, my editor, and my usual toolchain, if a bit slowly. It even handles HD video and the battery still holds a 6 hr charge. But it doesn't really have enough RAM to run a modern web browser. A few tabs and we are swapping. That's unusably slow. A proce…

Enable ZRAM. I run luakit with just 1GB of RAM and a compressed GB of ZRAM.

Atom n270 netbook, go figure.

Also, run this to get a system wide adblocker:

    git clone https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts
  
    cd hosts

    sed -n '/Start Steven/,$p'  hosts.append

    sudo cat hosts.append >> /etc/hosts

EDIT: wrong URL

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

#90

Post by squarefoot » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

I think the two top questions lots of Windows users would like answered now are:

0- Did they also remove telemetry and similar malware?

1- Is it usable for gaming? I mean, didn't they also remove anything important among the cruft? I have memories of shrunk XP "distros" back in the day that were hacked to the point they refused to run a lot of software.