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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

#281

Post by grishka »

bee_rider wrote: post #129
grishka wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> liberated us from writing specialized desktop apps for various OSes I use macOS and I very much dislike anything built with cross-platform GUI toolkits, and especially the web stack. And it's always painfully obvious when something is not native. It doesn't behave like the rest of the system. It's not mac-like . It draws its own buttons from scratch and does its own event handling on them instead of using NSButton.…

I don’t like the direction GUIs have gone either, and think the JavaScript-ization of everything has been pretty dumb. But it seems that bloat is doing well in the market. Users might not care about developer experience, but everything is a trade off: developer time is a cost, the cost of producing software is an input into how much it needs to cost. Users seem to want features delivered quickly, without much regard…

Users just don't have much say in the matter. Case in point: Discord and Slack are atrocious UX-wise. You're still forced to use them because, as with any walled-garden communication service, you aren't the one making this choice.

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

#282

Post by wizofaus »

Genbox wrote: post #195
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…

I've worked on several projects where performance was an afterthought. After the product scaled a bit, it suddenly became the highest priority - but at that time, it was impossible to fix. At least for everyone that created the problem to begin with. I've taught high performance data structures to dev teams. I've tried to explain how a complex problem can sometimes be solved with a simple algorithm. I've spent decade…

And I've worked on systems where months were essentially squandered on performance improvements that never paid off because we never grew the customer base sufficiently for them to be worth while...

I'm all for dedicating time and effort towards producing performant code, but it does come at a cost - in some cases, a cost of maintainability (for an extreme example there's always https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html). In fact I'd suggest in general if you design a library of functions where obviousness/clarity/ease-of-use are your primary criteria, performance is likely to suffer. And there are undoubtedly cases where the cost of higher-grade hardware (in terms of speed and storage capacity) is vastly lower than that of more efficient software. I'd also say performance tuning quite often involves significant trade-offs that lead to much higher memory usage - caching may well be the only way to achieve significant gains at certain scales, but then as you scale up even further, the memory requirements of the caching start to become an issue in themselves. If there were a simple solution it would have been found by now.

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

#283

Post by ShaneMcGowan »

MrYellowP wrote: post #177
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.

You're part of the reason why we're stuck in the mess most people, actual idiots, don't even acknowledge as a mess.

True but the products I build in this inefficient way solve other messes so you win some you lose some

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

#284

Post by wizofaus »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26
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.

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.

While I do agree with this, it seems worse than that - I've observed with a number of systems that used to run well 5 or so years ago that they simply don't any more, even with exactly the same OS and essentially the same software. I don't know to what degree that is because of actual hardware deterioration (or least, file system fragmentation), vs additional gumpf getting automatically installed and slowing it down (but every time I've tried to remove such gumpf, it hasn't really helped), or even because of user perception (but I don't buy that this explains cases of apps that now take over 30 seconds to start up, when they used to take 5 at most). I have one 8+ year old Windows 7 machine in particular that I use for music streaming, and basically can't be used for 30 seconds at least after logging in - but then seems mostly fine after that.

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

#285

Post by binarycrusader »

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…

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.

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

#286

Post by neogodless »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #152

Microsoft should just have an option for minimum base install and on demand feature download from cloud. Can't be the only option, because some devices need to be fully featured online, but otherwise wouldn't cost them anything, not even ability to nag people to try more of their freemium stuff. While the advantage for Microsoft would be access to low end Chromebook market while maintaining decent user satisfaction.…

Like Windows Server, with Roles and Applications?

Except your options in Windows 11 are "Buzzfeed style widget, remove all sensible taskbar configuration, add extra steps to any context menus, insert ads for OneDrive, Office, and Candy Crush at every opportunity!" Who would add them? :)

But seriously, the way Windows Server handles it is just great. Windows 11 could potentially have a more minimal install.

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

#287

Post by oefrha »

Dalewyn wrote: post #207
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because integration into the desktop is better as an Electron app. Eg sound and video calls, keyboard shortcuts, not having to worry about finding your Discord/Slack/whatever tab

I would't say Electron is better desktop integration. Discord for example is literally just a chrome-less Chrome; the zoom in/out hotkeys in Chrome still work in it. This is also not mentioning how no Electron program ever visually adheres to the desktop environment it's running in.

Electron apps can use desktop capabilities. Web apps are at the mercy of the few desktop-bridging APIs that browsers inconsistently expose. They’re not talking about UI/UX “integration”.

Discord for instance has this “currently playing game X” feature. I have zero interest in broadcasting what I’m doing at the moment to the world, but many do and have this feature enabled. Good luck implementing that in a browser-confined web app.

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

#288

Post by mixmastamyk »

janosdebugs wrote: post #166

Rant: Windows, sadly, seems to be moving more and more into the direction of the user being the product not the customer: you get spied upon, you get ads, you are subjected to changes to the deal without you ability to object. The only exception seem to be the enteprise versions. Darn it, we are paying for the bloody thing!

"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."

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

#289

Post by mixmastamyk »

Yeah, I remember using NT4 on a machine with 20MB of memory on a lab machine and thinking it was an ungodly amount. A few years later used an SGI with 256MB and thought the same. Actually needed it to flipbook a few minutes of movie resolution frames in RAM. cough

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

#290

Post by avx56 »

anthk wrote: post #88
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

No GUI though right?
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