Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

331–340 of 415 posts

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

#331

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…

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.

WinSxS also includes backups allowing to revert updates and disabled features. Cleaning up using dism has always recovered me a few GBs.

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

#332

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?

  dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
Gives both apparent (seen in Explorer) and actual size.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It liberated you as developer. As developer, I could understand. As user I hate you. You never provide me as user with native experience via web UI. You use custom controls, which broke conventions of native controls a little bit there and here. You can not use full power of OS (YouTube or Spotify player doesn't pause itself when workstation is locked, my native player of choice does). You eat my resources. You canno…

Everything is a trade-off. If, as a developer, you have to spend ungodly hours on learning multiple UIs, you will have less time left for the actual business logic of your app. Which, from the user's side, means one of the following three:

a) nice looking, but less capable apps,

b) more expensive apps, or, apps that have to be paid even if they could be free in an alternate universe,

c) limited availability - app X only exists for Windows and not Mac, because either a Mac programmer isn't available or would be too expensive.

Developing for multiple UIs at once is both prone to errors and more expensive, you wind up paying for extra developers, extra testers/QA, extra hardware and possibly extra IDEs and various fees. Such extra cost may be negligible for Google, but is absolutely a factor for small software houses outside the richest countries, much more so for "one person shows" and various underfunded OSS projects.

I remember the hell that was Nokia Series 60 and 90 programming. Nokia churned out a deluge of devices that theoretically shared the same OS, but they had so many device-specific quirks and oddities on the UI level that you spent most of the time fighting with (bad) emulators of devices you could not afford to buy. This is the other extreme and I am happy that it seems to be gone forever.

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

#334

There really should be a penalty for gratuitous waste of resources. Energy consumption is neither free nor without adverse impacts. The era of planed obsolescence, bloatware expanding to gobble up and justify ever more hardware is over. A fresh take on the desktop given the monstrous devices that are now available in terms of cpu, memory etc may completely redefine the footprint of personal computing

No, there should not. Otherwise every single app shop on earth is going to he paying it.

So?

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

#335

I really think Microsoft needs to take a hard look at Windows and realize that it needs the ability to switch, install, or even decide at boot as a purpose built OS. Take gaming for example, I pretty much only use my PC for gaming (I prefer my Mac for general purpose stuff) and there is a lot there that is really unnecessary. But where this really becomes an issue is on devices like the Steam Deck. I installed Window…

>I really think Microsoft needs to take a hard look at Windows and realize that it needs the ability to switch, install, or even decide at boot as a purpose built OS.

Possible by making your own custom image using dism. Everything debloat scripts are doing can be done before even making an ISO.

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

#337
post #8

Not 11 but the "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021" is significantly better if you want an (official) full fledged Windows OS without the bloat. I'm using that on the Steam Deck w/ dual booting and it's perfect

How you activate that? I think KMS will not work for IoT versions. I use KMS activated non-IoT LTSC 2021 on my obsolete Surface. MS will not sell that edition to "consumers" like me, so I don't feel guilty at all for pirating it.

Windows activation is a simple thing. You need a KMS emulator, and you need to point your Windows to that. If you don't want to set up your own emulator, you can just search the internet for emulators, and point your Windows to one of those. This is what most activators do anyways. But running your own is also easy, if compiling and running a software is easy for you. I personally use vlmcsd.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

> 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.

I'm not proposing that. I didn't propose any solution to this in my comment. For what its worth, I agree with you - another java swing style approach would be a terrible idea. And I have an irrational hate for docker.

If I were in solution mode, what I think we need is all the browser features to be added to desktop operating systems. And those features being:

- Cross platform apps of some kind

- The app should be able to run "directly" from the internet in a lightweight way like web pages do. I shouldn't need to install apps to run them.

- Fierce browser tab style sandboxing.

If the goal was to compete with the browser, apps would need to use mostly platform-native controls like browsers do. WASM would be my tool of choice at this point, since then people can make apps in any language.

Unfortunately, executing this well would probably cost 7-10 figures. And it'd probably need buy in from Apple, Google, Microsoft and maybe GTK and KDE people. (Since we'd want linux, macos, ios, android and windows versions of the UI libraries). Ideally this would all get embedded in the respective operating systems so users don't have to install anything special, otherwise the core appeal would be gone.

Who knows if it'll ever happen, or if we'll just be stuck with the web forever. But a man can dream.

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

#339

I really think Microsoft needs to take a hard look at Windows and realize that it needs the ability to switch, install, or even decide at boot as a purpose built OS. Take gaming for example, I pretty much only use my PC for gaming (I prefer my Mac for general purpose stuff) and there is a lot there that is really unnecessary. But where this really becomes an issue is on devices like the Steam Deck. I installed Window…

>I really think Microsoft needs to take a hard look at Windows and realize

Why though? Microsoft is a business, Windows is a product. It works well as a product, sales is good, deployments are many. Why should they reconsider the current strategy?

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

#340
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, OSX. A G4 with 512MB of RAM could perfectly do that at 1280x800.

NeXTSTEP 3.1 ran fine at 1152x832 4 shade mono with 20MB of RAM. 32MB if you were running color. It was also rendering Display PostScript on a 25Mhz '040. One of the first machines in its day that allowed you to drag full windows, rather than frames on the desktop. High tech in action!

You could also do that in '92-ish on RISC OS 3 running on a 1MB Acorn Archimedes with 12MHz ARM2 processor, with high quality font antialiasing. Those were the days!
Post reply on HN