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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

#221
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 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 i…

I'm curious if you've used Chrome OS recently, there's a lot of good work there too. Touch is there if you need it with the keyboard open, then goes into tablet mode if the laptop is convertible or detachable. The touch/tablet UI has lost many rough edges in the last 2-3 years, and it hasn't affected the mouse/keyboard mode most people use Chromebooks for.

I don't use Windows anymore but I remember thinking "this is exactly what I've always wanted from a convertible/touch-support-in-desktop OS"...

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

#222
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I’m on debian and using xfce. The problem is the web browser. I’ve got 16 gb of ram and the browser is using most of them. I can literally see the swap space emptying when i have (as in “im forced to”) sacrifice my browsing session (xkill the browser) due to constant swap out to disk. And I’m using a pci gen 3 nvme disk, and already lowered swappiness. The problem is the web browser.

Are you actually seeing degraded performance, or do you just have an aesthetic dislike of swapping?

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

#223
post #147
post #142

I just assume this 'release' has no malware or backdoors in it. I love the work of NTDev and even follow them on Twitter, but since this is closed source there's no way of eyeballing what changes have been made. I would run this an offline sandbox VM not connected to the Internet and for trying out different Windows software, but I wouldn't connect it to The Internet.

The same could be said for official Windows builds, except we know for sure they contain malware and back doors. For instance, Microsoft engineers have the ability to pull arbitrary files off Windows 11 machines, at least according to Microsoft press releases from a few years ago. Doing so required “managerial approval”, and was “only for debugging software faults”, but anyone vaguely familiar with the US CLOUD act k…

[deleted]

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

#225
post #149

It really staggers me the lengths some people will go to try and preserve something that is actively against them, when there are alternatives right there. I'm not saying Linux is for everyone, but the kind of people creating and running these scripts really should have no issue daily driving Ubuntu or even Arch. Or if they desperately need photoshop or whatever, get a mac. It's like watching people constantly go bac…

> Or if they desperately need photoshop or whatever, get a mac.

I'm kind of in that situation and I don't thing going with Mac and the Apple ecosystem really is better than trying to use Windows 10 as long as possible on an older Thinkpad.

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

#226

Honestly, I just gave up after I bought my last computer, installed POP OS and installed Steam and have so far been able to play all my games without a single issue, except The Witcher 3 which only required a configuration change and I was golden. I will use Windows only on work machines but on personal machines its Linux for me from now on.

youre cursed like the rest of us and you will use windows only on work machines AND GAME MACHINES and linux for personal EDIT: spelling and attempted to adjust elegance

Not really Proton on Steam runs all my games just fine on Linux.

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

#227

My biggest issue is disk bloat, I use many vms on my laptop, windows vms regularly end up 60+gb for a pretty standard deploy (windows+msvs or office). It normally comes down to a bloated winsxs folder, but I feel like attempting to fix that is playing with fire. Compare that to Linux, 10gb with a full gui, and minimal bloat after the fact and it’s extremely frustrating.

Reminds me of the pain point I have with Windows Gaming PCs!

Both my teenagers have 2x 1TB NVME drives installed to deal with the insane requirements of Steam, Epic and Xbox gamepass games.

We live in Australia with ~25Mpbs download FTTN, so installing and uninstalling is a huge pain and isnt practical.

I have a similar issue with Apple selling Macs with 256GB hard drives! Even with iCloud photo and docs offload, these Macs are close to useless as you'll constantly bump into storage issues.

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

#228

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.

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.

This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. Microsoft and Apple are either too closely nit or drectly provide hardware to be prolonging the liftime of hardware they sell. In optimizing open OS's it can prolong the life time of hardware by a significant margin and it means that lower in come folks are not left in the dark. I don't just mean in well off countries, but if you are in the lower classes of the global south - there is no other option.

These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. "

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox...

This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

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

#229
post #216
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…

> > browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves > No one asked for this. My personal opinion is that everything app-like about browsers needs to be undone, yesterday, and they should again become the hypertext document viewers they were meant to be. Even JS is too much, but I guess it does have to stay. People did ask for this, because it made them a lot of money.…

> No one asked for this.

What people want is a way to run amazon.com (and gmail and slack and so on), on any of their devices, securely, and without the fuss of installing anything.

Ideally the first-time use of amazon.com should involve nothing more than typing "amazon" and hitting enter. It should to show content almost instantly.

Satisfying that user need doesn't require a web browser. If OS vendors provided a way to do that today, we'd be using it. But they don't.

OS vendors still don't understand that. They assume people forever want to install software via a package manager. They assume software developers care about their platform's special features enough to bother learning Kotlin / Swift / GTK / C# / whatever. And they assume all software users run should be trusted with all of my local files.

Why is docker popular? Because it lets you type the name of some software. The software is downloaded from the internet. The software runs on linux/mac/windows. And it runs in a sandbox. Just like the web.

The web - for all its flaws - is still the only platform which delivers that experience to end users.

I'd throw out javascript and the DOM and all that rubbish in a heartbeat if we had any better option.

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

#230
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from windows to macOS, which I’ve been using as my daily driver for the last year or so. Using the touchpad (or maybe the Magic Mouse) is basically a requirement to use “vanilla” macOS. Yes, you can install additional programs to help with window management, etc., but in my experience macOS is absolutely horrible when it comes to accessibility, from this standpoint. Maybe it’s better for colors, TTS, etc.?

Did you enable Full Keyboard Access and learn how to use it?

I’ll check it out. But this seems to approach accessibility as a feature to be turned on or off. Most of what it enables, based on Apple docs, is not just enabled in Windows and many Linux window managers I’ve used, but it’s something that developers actively utilize.
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