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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

#381

Post by cratermoon »

prmoustache wrote: post #317
cratermoon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to add that accessibility is not a binary that's either on or off. Parent comment might be thinking of features for people with high disability ratings, but eventually everyone has some level of disability. Some even start of life with one: color blindness, vision impairment. Most people have progressive near vision loss (presbyopia) as they age. Also, disability may not be permanent. I recently underwe…

And I'll had you want it available on the installer already. Having said that you canct explain all that bloat with accessibility.

> you want it available on the installer already

Of course. Navigating around the install process without accessibility already enabled is going to be a non-starter for many.

As for why all the bloat? I speculate it's because accessibility features are a second-class citizen at best, and when it comes to optimizing and streamlining, all the effort in development goes into the most-used features, whether or not they are the most essential.

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

#382

Post by yodon »

josephg wrote: post #338
tsimionescu wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mod…

> what I think we need is all the browser features to be added to desktop operating systems.

I trust you are aware Microsoft did exactly that, and the entire tech world exploded in annger, and the US Government took Microsoft to court to make them undo it on the grounds that integrating browser technology into the OS was a monopolistic activity[0].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

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

#383

Post by binarycrusader »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #331
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.

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

The amount of backups in there is fairly minimal and is limited to a folder called “backups”. As for disabled features, the size of disabled features there is also relatively small, not gigabytes.

Any space reclaimed using dism’s startcomponentcleanup is only from removal of superseded updates which normally happens automatically whenever the maintenance task runs after a certain period of time.

Note that I explicitly consider backups separate from superseded updates. Superseded updates are kept for a period of time to allow the user to uninstall a newer update.

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

#384

Post by jeroenhd »

michaelmrose wrote: post #167
jeroenhd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resolutions and HDR are one area where I think the extra RAM load and increasing application sizes make complete sense. However, my monitors run at 1080p, don't do HDR, and my video files are rncoded at a standard colour depth. Despite all this, the standalone RAM usage has increased over the years. Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility fram…

SSD access times are as much as 100,000 ns memory 50 ms SSD do not negate the virtue of cache.

True, but with those access times you can wait a lot longer for content to be loaded into RAM. Hard drives are the reason for many years games needed to duplicate their assets, for example, because seek times slowed down loading time and putting the same content in the file twice but at the right place would speed up the loading process significantly. Games today still have special HDD code because of the difference in performance class.

SSDs won't replace RAM but many RAM caches aren't performance critical; sometimes you need your code to be reasonably fast on a laptop with a 5400 rpm hard drive and then you have very little choice of data structures. With the random access patterns SSDs allow this complication quickly disappears. You won't find many Android apps that will cache 8MB block reads to compensate for a spinning hard drive, for example.

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

#385

Post by wizofaus »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #377
wizofaus wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Windows Rot" is definitely a thing but it can be cleared out by doing a clean reinstall of the OS. While this can be time consuming, you'd likely be doing it anyway if you got a new machine.

No idea where I'd even find an installer for Windows 7! It does make me wonder whether upgrading it would actually help. But for now it works well enough I'd rather not risk it (the other thing I use it for is some old software that requires a FAT partition for its licensing to work!).

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

#386

Post by josephg »

tsimionescu wrote: post #349
josephg wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mod…

My thinking is that, ultimately, if you want to run the same code on Windows, MacOS, and a few popular Linux distros, and to do so on x86 and ARM, you need some kind of VM that translates an intermediate code to the machine code, and that implements a whole ton of system APIs for each platform. Especially if you want access to a GUI, networking, location, 3D graphics, Bluetooth, sound etc. - all of which have virtual…

> You'll then have to convince Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM RedHat, Canonical, the Debian project, and a few others, to actually package this VM with their OSs, so that users don't have to manually choose to install it.

I think this is the easy part. Everyone is already on board with webassembly. The hard part would be coming up with a common api which paves over all the platform idiosyncrasies in a way that feels good and native everywhere, and that developers actually want to use.

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

#387

Post by wizofaus »

Genbox wrote: post #380
wizofaus wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/folklor…

Performance is not the same as efficiency, and efficiency can't be solved with more hardware. Let's say I build a sorting algorithm that is O(N^2) complexity and works fine for small inputs (takes One of the corps I worked with went full scalability in their architecture. One-click deployments, dynamic scaling of servers, rebalancing of databases, automatic provisioning of storage. They were handling 40-50k requests…

I'm struggling to believe any single server could usefully service 2100k (well over 2 million!) requests per second. Even Google, with their vast farm of servers, reportedly only process less than 100k requests per second globally. I've certainly read of servers capable of handling in the order of 1000k requests per second as a benchmark, but the requests are usually pretty trivial (the one I saw literally did no input processing at all, and just returned a single fixed byte! But was written in Java, surprisingly.) At any rate, I would think a tiny % of real-life systems actually need to be able to support that sort of load, and bringing in somebody to do the scalability work once it's clear it's needed seems like exactly the right strategy to me.

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

#388

Post by mixedCase »

znpy wrote: post #321
enticingturtle wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd suggest again to try NoScript/Adblocking, disable hardware accel if you have it enabled, enable it if disabled.

If even there you have no success, I'd suggest you try something like EndeavorOS. Browsers have issues but that is not normal. You're not using Debian stable on the desktop, right?

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

#389

Post by anthk »

prmoustache wrote: post #322
avx56 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1GB user there. 4-5 tabs it's fine under Luakit, ZRAM (1GB virtual + 1GB physical = 2GB) and a hosts blocking file.

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

#390

Post by Wowfunhappy »

wizofaus wrote: post #385
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Windows Rot" is definitely a thing but it can be cleared out by doing a clean reinstall of the OS. While this can be time consuming, you'd likely be doing it anyway if you got a new machine.

No idea where I'd even find an installer for Windows 7! It does make me wonder whether upgrading it would actually help. But for now it works well enough I'd rather not risk it (the other thing I use it for is some old software that requires a FAT partition for its licensing to work!).

I have a retail copy of Windows 7 on a DVD! But yeah, if you didn't buy it back in the day I'm not sure where you'd get it now.

Windows 10 (and I assume 11) has an option to "refresh" Windows in Settings.

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