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

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

#121

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #103

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to invest into an expensive new machine; a device from 5 years ago, with some more added RAM, would already be pretty adequate. Typing this from a Thinkpad T470 which was introduced in 2017, which is my main workhorse machine. A top-of-the-line laptop CPU from 20 years ago likely just doesn't support addressing more than 4GB or RAM. Forcing it to work on modern resource-heavy Web pages and media is like forci…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by indigodaddy » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

I’m guessing there is no ARM/Pi version for this?..

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

#123

Post by justsomehnguy » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #119

anthk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Actually, IIRC the only requirement for DWM to work was a GPU that supports shaders, because that's what makes the window border translucency/blur effect possible.

Compatible driver, actually. There were at least DWM 1.0 (Vista) and DWM 1.2 (Win7), but Intel never provided a compatible driver for... 915? Series, so you could't enable composition on them, despite hardware were capable enough.

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

#124

Post by grishka » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

matthew-wegner wrote: post #82

grishka wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 requi…

Screen reader support by itself doesn't gobble memory. Android has had it for ages, and still runs on devices with less than 1 GB RAM (Android Wear watches).

Running several instances of Chromium though... You'll probably run one anyway at all times as your actual web browser, but additional ones in the form of "oh so easy to build" Electron apps don't help. In Apple's eyes, though, you should absolutely ignore other browsers and use Safari exclusively. It might not be as much of a memory hog as Chrome — I haven't researched this, this is simply my guesses.

I also heard that M1 Macs are better at memory management compared to Intel. Again, I don't have any concrete evidence to back this up, but knowing Apple, it's believable.

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

#125

Post by avinassh » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

haunter wrote: post #42

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the difference between IoT and normal LTSC?

Here is a handy reddit post when I was researching the same https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/comments/qw1qrs/ltsc_... The main difference that IoT has longer lifecycle support, the activation method is different (but you don't even have to), and the IoT version is only available in english But it doesn't really matter they are virtually the same

wait, can I use this as a daily driver on a laptop?

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

#126

Post by haunter » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #107

haunter wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

This seems magically good. Now, of course, the struggle is to see how I can get the ISO and get it activated. I'm woefully out of the loop.

As pretty much with a lot of things nowadays Archive.org is your friend https://archive.org/details/en-us_windows_10_iot_enterprise_...

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

#127

Post by nerdjon » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

I really think Microsoft needs to take a hard look at Windows and realize that it needs the ability to switch, install, or even decide at boot as a purpose built OS.

Take gaming for example, I pretty much only use my PC for gaming (I prefer my Mac for general purpose stuff) and there is a lot there that is really unnecessary. But where this really becomes an issue is on devices like the Steam Deck.

I installed Windows 10 on mine, used a debloat script to remove anything that was not strictly necessary for gaming, downloading games, and related tasks and I was able to get better performance and battery life for the same games than I did under SteamOS.

While I imagine that this would complicate testing of updates to support these separate purposes, it feels like Windows is trying to do to much all at once.

However I also recognize that much of what I removed is also things like telemetry that I doubt they would remove.

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

#128

Post by haunter » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

avinassh wrote: post #125

haunter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a handy reddit post when I was researching the same https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/comments/qw1qrs/ltsc_... The main difference that IoT has longer lifecycle support, the activation method is different (but you don't even have to), and the IoT version is only available in english But it doesn't really matter they are virtually the same

wait, can I use this as a daily driver on a laptop?

I use it to play games! It's totally perfect as a daily driver

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

#129

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:29 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.…

I don’t like the direction GUIs have gone either, and think the JavaScript-ization of everything has been pretty dumb. But it seems that bloat is doing well in the market.

Users might not care about developer experience, but everything is a trade off: developer time is a cost, the cost of producing software is an input into how much it needs to cost. Users seem to want features delivered quickly, without much regard to implementation quality.

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

#130

Post by grishka » Sat, Feb 04, 2023, 6:31 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #81

grishka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system

There is a system-provided color palette. I don't know where this UI is in modern Windows, but in versions where you could enable the "classic" theme, you could still configure these colors. They are, of course, exposed to apps, and apps are expected to use them to draw their controls. That, as well as theme elements since XP.

> Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs.

Making sure you don't break existing functionality is called regression testing. I'm sure Microsoft already does a lot of it for each release.

And actually it's not quite that. The transition from 9x to NT involved swapping an entire kernel from underneath apps. Most apps didn't notice it. In fact, the backwards compatibility is maintained so well that I can run apps from the 90s — built for, and only tested on, the old DOS-based Windows versions — on my modern ARM Mac, in a VM, through an x86 -> ARM translation layer.