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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

#151

Post by ComputerGuru »

zozbot234 wrote: post #34
bsuvc wrote: post #10

How does this compare to a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is not really "lightweight" in my experience. A really light Linux install uses maybe 0.2 GB RAM at the desktop, which lets you do some very basic web browsing even on a 1 GB system.

As someone that has built Linux (and various BSDs) "from scratch," your statement contains the biggest contradiction/problem.

I can get a fully functionable desktop with GUI apps, generic hardware support (i.e. not locked down to my hardware), support for dynamic modules/drivers/libraries, audio, 3d-accelerated video, and more in a 300 MiB footprint (with only basic iso image compression) and runnable with 128 MiB of RAM.

Then comes in the last part of your statement: "do some very basic web browsing." The system above works just fine with a browser featuring < 201x tech, with great CSS, JS, HTML support. But if I need to build and bundle the latest Firefox, Chrome, or whatever without manually stripping out a ton of features (beyond what is available via distro package managers), that footprint triples or quadruples in size and the memory requirements skyrocket.

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

#152

Post by cat_plus_plus »

Microsoft should just have an option for minimum base install and on demand feature download from cloud. Can't be the only option, because some devices need to be fully featured online, but otherwise wouldn't cost them anything, not even ability to nag people to try more of their freemium stuff. While the advantage for Microsoft would be access to low end Chromebook market while maintaining decent user satisfaction. Also, fewer components on each device means faster and less annoying updates / fewer embarrassing high profile hacks through exploits in components that the customer didn't need. Can also come up with a way to periodically purge components unused for extended time.

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

#153

Post by yobbo »

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…

> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything

May I remind of https://www.enlightenment.org/

20 years ago, there were "live cds" that could do most of what you mention, at maybe 512 MB ram.

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

#154

Post by hulitu »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #100
abraxas wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility support was in Windows 95 as far as I remember.

Are you seriously suggesting that accessibility support in modern OSes is less complex than in Windows 95?

Yes. At least in Windows 10 is a disaster. Without high contrast, which looks terrible, it draws gray colors on light background making it difficult to read.

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

#155

Post by ComputerGuru »

The post mentions that the Windows App Store is still available and can be used to get required apps as needed, but I don't think this is really correct. Component activation plays a huge role in "modern" UAP or WinRT-enabled applications and without WinSxS, I'm not sure how much of component activation will work.

Obviously basic component activation is functional otherwise the shell wouldn't function (my biggest problem with WinRT/UAP: its insidious creep into the OS "internals" rather than just powering apps, widgets, add-ons, whatever on top of the base system), but I'm not sure how many apps you might pick at random from the app store will still work.

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

#156

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against high-memory bloat in computing today.

Nobody is a hypocrite for buying X gigabytes of ram but also wanting the naked operating system to use a much smaller amount, or wanting single programs to use a much smaller amount.

> 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?

What makes a screen reader gobble memory?

And it definitely shouldn't gobble memory when it's not running.

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

#157

Post by nateb2022 »

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 Windows on touchscreen anything. Microsoft decided that themselves and ruined the UX for the remaining 99% of the users that still use a mouse and a keyboard.

I have several devices, including a couple Linux PC's, an M1 macbook air, and a Microsoft Surface Go. If Windows 11 didn't support touchscreens, I would have gone with an iPad. However, Windows 11 is the _best_ touchscreen OS to-date.

Unlike iOS or iPadOS, Windows 11 runs desktop apps and combines the convenience of touchscreen scrolling/interaction with the desktop experience. Windows 11 does this very, very well.

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

#158

Post by at_a_remove »

haunter wrote: post #126
at_a_remove wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Thank you! I'm also a little shocked, I had no idea Archive.org was doing this. I'm starting to get the impression that there's quite a lot going on under the hood at archive.org, just reams of stuff I've never noticed ...

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

#159

Post by hulitu »

dagmx wrote: post #85
KronisLV wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pervasiven…

> Windows, Electron

Gray on gray, Teams. Accessible like a hammer: everything looks like nails.

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

#160

Post by api »

nine_k wrote: post #114
weinzierl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) * pr…

Sure, Commodore could do all that! But if you had to use that software now, you'd say (justly) that it's extremely basic and limited, and that interoperability with other systems is not great. What can be done ≠ what's comfortable to use.

That doesn’t account for the sheer monstrosity of modern software. You don’t need gigabytes of RAM for those things.
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