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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

#321

Post by znpy »

enticingturtle wrote: post #222
znpy wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m seeing literal freezes (can’t do anything, even mouse pointer is frozen). But if I kill the browser everything becomes snappy again.

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

#322

Post by prmoustache »

avx56 wrote: post #290
anthk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenWRT Linux with Musl ran fine under 48MB of RAM, 7-8MB running. Modern GNU/Linux, I mean.

No GUI though right?

Today's version of icewm takes around 16mb of memory, xorg will add a bit to it.

There are smaller window managers but I choose this one as an example as it gives a similar experience to the windows xp of olds.

I have done the experience on slimming as much as possible a desktop. But once you start a web browser with more than 3 tabs memory usage goes through the roof. In the end if you want to run an old system with 512mb of ram you are kind of forced to use the web sans javascript and images. You are almost better off using links or w3m and tui apps for everything. Netsurf can work too if you are limiting the number of tabs open.

One a 1GB system you can definitely use a modern web browser but you definitely need the ad/trackers removal extensions and have to take good care of not opening more than 2-3 tabs or you will start swapping a lot.

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

#323

Post by josephg »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #137
arbitrage wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Are the types of things I want that laptop to do different today than they were 8 years ago? Sure, apps and websites are heavier, but I'd posit the things most people do on their computers haven't changed in a decade at least. > That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing. Yes, but again, why? As I see it, everyone has been conditioned to this lie that computers naturally slow down o…

I absolutely agree. It seems like most software developers only start optimizing code once our software starts feeling slow on our top-of-the-line development machines. As a result, every time we get faster computers we write slower code. When the M1 macs and the new generation of AMD (and now intel) chips came out 18 months or so ago, I spent big. I figured I had about 2 years of everything feeling fast before everyone else upgraded, and all the software I use slowed down again.

Years ago while I was at a startup, I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday. I wanted to write some code over the weekend. Well, I had a raspberry pi kicking around, so I fired up nodejs on that and took our project for a spin. But the program took ages to start up. I hadn't noticed the ~200ms startup time on my "real" computer, but on a r.pi that translated to over 1 second of startup time! So annoying! I ended up spending a whole morning profiling and debugging to figure out why it was so slow. Turns out we were pulling in some huge libraries and only using a fraction of the code inside. Trimming that down made the startup time ~5x faster. When I got into the office on monday, I pulled in my changes and felt the speed immediately. But I never would have fixed that if I hadn't spent that weekend developing on the raspberry pi.

Since then I've been wondering there's a way to do this systematically. Have "slow CPU tuesdays" or something, where everyone in the office turns off most of our CPU cores out of solidarity with our users. But I'm not holding my breath.

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

#324

Post by twelvedogs »

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…

it does more than that, it keeps a copy of every dll you've ever installed not just the ones in use. there's a reason it just gets bigger forever even if you don't install more programs

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

#325

Post by colinsane »

vbezhenar wrote: post #275
gigel82 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how much RAM does it take? You let that bit out.

If they spend money for NVMe SSD, 38" display and 2 Gbps fiber. My bet is 128GB.

i’ll bet they went for less than max RAM capacity, even if they could afford it:

- most motherboards reduce the DDR clock when using > 2 sticks.

- higher capacity RAM sticks use more “ranks” (AKA “banks”), which increases latency.

as of 2 years ago, 2x single rank DDR would limit you to 64GB. but 2 years is a long time in computerland: 64GB single rank sticks sound plausible.

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

#326

Post by tsimionescu »

josephg wrote: post #311
bufferoverflow wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What people want is a way to run amazon.com (and gmail and slack and so on) Guess what, both GMail and Slack have video calls. They use WebRTC. The browser has to support it. So the WebRTC code is a part of it. > 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. And it does. Open an incognito tab, type amazon.com,…

> Open an incognito tab, type amazon.com, it's pretty crazy how fast it loads, with all the images. Yes; that's my point. That's the bar native apps need to reach to be competitive with the web.

You're just proposing to move all the complexity of the browser into some other VM that would have to be shipped by default by all OS platforms before it could become useful.

Java tried exactly this, and it never took off in the desktop OS world. It wasn't significantly slimmer than browsers either, so it wouldn't have addressed any of your concerns.

Also, hyperlinking deep into and out of apps is still something that would be very very hard to achieve if the apps weren't web native - especially given the need to share data along with the links, but in a way that doesn't break security. I would predict that if you tried to recreate a platform with similar capabilities, you would end up reinventing 90% of web tech (though hopefully with a saner GUI model than the awfulness of HTML+CSS+JS).

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

#327

Post by teo_zero »

retrac wrote: post #47
ShaneMcGowan wrote: post #17

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.

I have a netbook from around 2010. It has 2 GB of RAM and a single core Atom processor. It boots to a full Linux GUI desktop in a minute or so. It can handle CAD software, my editor, and my usual toolchain, if a bit slowly. It even handles HD video and the battery still holds a 6 hr charge. But it doesn't really have enough RAM to run a modern web browser. A few tabs and we are swapping. That's unusably slow. A proce…

Same here, except I fine-tuned the kernel to boot under 10 s.

Of course it can't run all today's bloated software, but we're talking about the operating system, here, not the applications.

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

#328

Post by dijit »

nateb2022 wrote: post #161
worble wrote: 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…

Agreed. My initial response to any post beginning something like "On Windows XP..." "On Windows 7..." "On Debian..." would be like: "Well you already have Windows XP/7/Debian/whatever. If you want to use that, use that. Nobody is forcing you to use Windows 11." For the people who do want to use Windows 11, and who see it for what it is, it's pretty great. For the people who use Windows XP/7 or who stick to some minim…

> Nobody is forcing you to use Windows 11.

This is not strictly true, theres tonnes of reasons to use windows, for example I run thousands of gameservers.

If I can shave memory usage of the OS that translates to a lot of cost savings.

Windows XP/Vista/7 and soon: 10 being EOL does force me to upgrade.

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

#330

Post by colinsane »

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.

> For now developers can just slap a web app into some chromium based wrapper […]

making 10% of users unreachable in order to more easily reach the other 90%. yeah, it’s a fine business strategy. though i do wish devs would be more amenable to the 10% of users who end up doing “weird” things with their app as a result. a stupid number of chat companies will release some Electron app that’s literally unusable on old hardware, and then freak out when people write 3rd party clients for it because it’s the only real option you left them.

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