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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

#171

Post by demetrius »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #23
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…

Um. Where else do you need it to run in 2GB but embedded? I think the article is informative, fair and correct.

> Where else do you need it to run in 2GB but embedded?

I use an eeePC laptop with 2 Gb or RAM as my home computer. It's quite usable with Linux.

Not that I'm planning to install Win11 on it, but the assumption that 2GB is enough only for embedded devices is incorrect.

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

#172

Post by mixedCase »

yobbo wrote: post #153
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, 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.

I ran e16 and then e17 as my main desktop back in the day for a good while. I'm sorry but what we had back then was nowhere even near what I'm talking about.

It definitely was pretty for the day, though.

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

#173

Post by gbin »

tester756 wrote: post #22
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…

> has not grown in complexity by four orders of magnitude in 20 years. How about all those sandboxes, protections and mitigations? Nowadays people care about security waaay more than people did 20-30 years ago.

Unfortunately more like nagging features, crapware, etc...

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

#174

Post by mixedCase »

znpy wrote: post #93
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…

to be honest i'd give up most of today's niceties to get a snappier computer experience. and to be honest, nowadays the biggest issue is the web browser and the sheer amount of memory and processing that modern websites use. it's unbelievable.

It is still possible to have a snappy computer experience. Go Linux, use a very configurable distro (Arch, Gentoo, NixOS), choose a lightweight DE and app ecosystem and it will get you there for the most part.

Browsers are still going to be the sticking point, but with agressive adblockers/noscript and hardware that's not terribly old (NVMe storage is priority 1), and you should be set.

But of course, snappiness isn't free and you have to spend some time doing first time set-ups and maintenance.

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

#175

Post by ndriscoll »

arbitrage wrote: post #108
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.

Expecting your 8+ year old laptop to run as well as it did when it was new is completely unreasonable. That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.

I've never expected my computer to run worse over time. There's no real mechanism for that to even happen; it works fine until it fails completely.

Recently it's become less possible to run the same software for 10+ years because so many things are subscription only and have unnecessary networking, which makes it necessary to patch security flaws, and then you have to accept whatever downgrade the vendor forces on you.

Older applications that you used to be able to just install run just as well as they did the day they came out on the hardware available at the time. The idea that computers "get worse" is entirely a phenomenon of the industry being full of incompetence. Even (or perhaps especially) programmers at FAANG companies are just not very good at their jobs.

Check out the argument Casey Muratori got into with the Microsoft terminal maintainers about how slow the thing was. He got the standard claims about how "oh it's so complex and Unicode is difficult and he's underestimating how hard it is", so he wrote a renderer in a few hours that was orders of magnitude faster, used way less memory, and had better Unicode support.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by MrYellowP »

ShaneMcGowan wrote: post #17
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…

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.

You're part of the reason why we're stuck in the mess most people, actual idiots, don't even acknowledge as a mess.

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

#178

Post by dagmx »

hulitu wrote: post #159
dagmx wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Irrelevant. You can make bad apps in any framework and bad accessibility choices as well. That’s not a reflection of the framework or tool itself

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

#179

Post by MrYellowP »

josefx wrote: post #104
DrewRWx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is depressing that I had this same argument in college a decade ago and people are still so cavalier about not optimizing their code.

To be fair, if you forced programmers to write efficient code you would just make everything more expensive and flood the market for unskilled labor with university graduates that can't find their own ass.

Actually no. If programmers actually learned how to properly program the machines, we'd not be in the mess we are in right now. Abstraction is the cancer that got us to where we are.

Nobody has any actual clue what they're doing, everyone keeps writing code for the compiler hoping for the best and the rest of the world has to buy new machines because the programmers of the last decades sucked.

That, btw, includes most of you people reading this. You're fucking welcome.

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

#180

Post by dariusj18 »

pas wrote: post #52
Dalewyn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more than you think: * Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games. * Discord is 32-bit.

How come people run these Electron apps separately when they run pretty well as tabs/windows in the browser?

Because a long time ago Microsoft lost a lawsuit when they tried making the web and Windows more integrated
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