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

Post by sicp-enjoyer » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 5:18 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #251

sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would say programs today are equally efficient and more stable, just have more features?

In generally I would say far more stable and far more features. But this of course is in the metrics of how you measure. Windows 3.1 for example was a huge crashing piece of crap that was locking up all the damned time. MacOS at the time wasn't that much better. Now I can leave windows up for a month at a time between security reboots. Specialized Windows and Linux machines in server environments on a reduced patchin…

Post by binarycrusader » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 5:23 AM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #295

binarycrusader wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that removing WinSxS saves space is generally misguided anyway. The vast majority of content there is actually the original file that was used to create a hard link at the destination. So obviously removing the file doesn’t really save any appreciable amount of space. The remaining content unique to WinSXS is either for cryptographic validation, app compat, or the driver stack.

Hmm, so how can you see the real size of winsxs?

Post by vitorgrs » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 5:54 AM 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…

Post by adrianN » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 6:01 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #197

mixedCase wrote: post #174

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.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 6:36 AM 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…