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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

#131

Post by hnarn »

nerdjon wrote: post #127

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…

What debloat script did you use, and how did you decide which one to use? My experience is that there is a lot of them out there, and it's impossible to tell which ones actually do something that results in an observable difference, and what the potential drawbacks are of the things being changed.

A lot of the time I feel like you end up with having to do a lot of research for a very minor practical effect.

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

#133

Post by hedora »

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…

Prodigy had vector based graphics in a terminal back in the 1980’s. Granted, that targeted EGA and 2400 baud modems, but I wonder how well it would work on modern hardware if you just gave it a 4k, 24bit frame buffer, and fixed up the inevitable integer overflows.

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

#134

Post by kytazo »

pancrufty wrote: post #5

It’s a great exercise but this is akin to Alpine Linux: it works for some things but you wouldn’t use it as your daily driver

Well, to be honest, I've been daily driving alpinelinux for quite a while, first on an x86 desktop and nowadays on my apple silicon macbook.

In my experience alpine is a good fit from anything between an OCI container all the way up to a full fledged desktop or your server. But that's not all, you can have it running on your rpi or even your smartphone as architectures like arm are really a first-class citizen something relatively uncommon even with popular distros like arch which has only a fraction of its packages available for different architectures.

Alpine may come pretty bare-bones by default but don't let that fool you, its more than capable for at least anything a regular distro is if you know what to do with it. Even if you're a casual linux user you can get it setup in no time by using the setup-* commands that it ships with eg setup-desktop which takes care of setting up a desktop environment without you having to worry about dbus,seatd,compositors or things like that. Also their repositories are filled with almost any package someone would need and can always be coupled with complementary package managers like nix and flatpak in cases where apk isn't enough.

I love alpine and the aforementioned causes do justice a fraction of reasons, especially when considering things like running on a much leaner and modern c runtime musl instead of glibc, being systemd free and having a minimal dep, bare-bones/ bloat-free philosophy as it was originally intended for use on constrained embedded devices like routers. Its one of, if not the best distros available in my opinion, amongst nixos and gentoo which I deeply respect as well. That being said, one has to factor in the drawbacks some of these features like systemd-free and musl imply when assessing combatibility but I'm having trouble remembering cases where I've ran into deadlocks even on exotic setups like alpine on aarch64 architecture running natively on a M1 macbook with a custom kernel like asahi-linux or a sdm845 oneplus 6T smartphone with pmOS.

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

#135

Post by nerdjon »

hnarn wrote: post #131
nerdjon wrote: post #127

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…

What debloat script did you use, and how did you decide which one to use? My experience is that there is a lot of them out there, and it's impossible to tell which ones actually do something that results in an observable difference, and what the potential drawbacks are of the things being changed. A lot of the time I feel like you end up with having to do a lot of research for a very minor practical effect.

I used this one https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater and yeah I had to heavily customize it and then I did need to re-enable something afterwords which I found on the github.

Basically what I did was I started with the default and then unchecked (or checked? I don't remember what the UI called for now) anything related to Xbox and the Store and I didnt have any issues.

I also did a comparison before and after and it was actually a pretty decent improvement. About a 10fps improvement over SteamOS and a Normal Windows 10.

For me the biggest incentive was being able to play xbox game pass games and not needing to worry about any compatibility issues with Proton which is why I went down that route.

But yeah your second part is very true. I feel, the impact is minimal if you are on a traditional PC. But on something with such limited resources like a Steam Deck, the difference can be going from 40 fps to mid 50's and a few more minutes of battery life.

But it isn't something I would recommend most people do. More just kinda pointing out that with the effort I think Microsoft could make a lean Windows really just by taking a look at what is actually necessary to be run for specific tasks.

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

#136

Post by hedora »

wnevets wrote: post #132

> Moreover, removing the Windows Component Store (WinSxS), which is responsible for a fair degree of Tiny11’s compactness, means that installing new features or languages isn’t possible. I don't know if I can consider this "bloat" removal.

Couldn’t you add tar back in, then package whatever these updates are as tarball patches of C:\, and a regedit script?

That’d take well under 1MB.

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

#137

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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.

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 over time, because that's the way it has always been relative to the speed of current software. Originally, that was for a good reason—I'm glad programs now use full-color GUIs. But now?

What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow, and we were no longer able to make computers faster than they are today? I suspect that a (slim) majority of computer users would actually benefit. Not hardcore gamers, not scientists, and certainly not software developers--some people really do need as much performance as they can get. But for the people who just need to message friends, write documents, check email, etc., the experience would be unchanged—except that their current computers would never slow down!

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

#138

Post by dagmx »

SSLy wrote: post #79
doubled112 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got 8GB of RAM on my GPU. Could we stop shuffling it out? Do more of the work there, directly?

sure https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/sys...

Direct storage doesn’t address the majority of these concerns though. It only means the CPU doesn’t need to load data first to shuffle it over, but it doesn’t help if the CPU does need to access said data or schedule it.

It’s largely applicable mainly to games where resource access is known ahead of time.

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

#139

Post by aaron695 »

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…

[dead]

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

#140

Post by hedora »

I had a similar experience with GrapheneOS on my pixel 6 pro.

It got multi-day battery life out of the box, which is far in excess of what Google advertises for that hardware.

Once I installed google play services (which have zero end-user benefit, other than enabling compatibility with apps that have bundled google spyware), battery life more than halved, bringing it in line with what Google claims.

I suspect anti-trust and consumer protection lawsuits would start flying around if more people realized that over 50% of their phone battery was there to support malicious bundled code.

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