21 ms·

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

474 points by smusamashah 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago
Previous submission [1] Is there a repo with the scripts and tools required to build these images from a bog standard Windows 11 ISO? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647699
- RamRodification 4y ago
  Curious as well. Installing a Windows version that some guy has messed with is out of the question for me. Maybe he has lots of cred on the scene and I'm overly cautious, I dunno.
debacle 4y ago
Windows 11 has some nice features but I am on 10 until they fix some things.
- tester756 4y ago
  Which? I've only noticed lack of right click on taskbar, which sucks, but I don't see other things that need fix
  - chmod775 4y ago
    Can I put the taskbar along the left side of the screen yet?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      No, but I don't think they're ever going to change that back.
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      In all seriousness, this is the main reason I haven't checked out 11 yet. Changing the position of the taskbar like this is "OS Smell", and I can't ever see 11 becoming more than the next ME/Vista/8.
    - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
      No, Microsoft knows better than the user. "Nobody uses that feature, what are you, a Linux user!?" /s
  - jaredhallen 4y ago
    The missing option to never combine taskbar buttons is really bugging me.
    - krembo 4y ago
      Being a pain for me as well, I ended up using apps to fix that like Explorer Patcher, StartAllBack or a registry hack I've just read about.
  - RamRodification 4y ago
    Right-click menu on files missing all the actually useful stuff is a huge annoyance for me. I think there's some registry change that somewhat brings it all back, but IIRC it doesn't always give you the full menu anyway.
    - AlfeG 4y ago
      There is an Explorer Patcher tool on Github. It's doing pretty much great work for fixing Win11 issues!
      - RamRodification 4y ago
        Cool. Got a link?
    - tester756 4y ago
      oh, I've changed that right away after W11 update with single reg. change and since that it's fine
Someone1234 4y ago
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 good at and use it for that. Namely, "offline" Windows for some appliance-like usage (e.g. factory controls, display screens, et al) when Linux won't do for whatever reason and licensing Windows IoT isn't possible (small business/personal project/etc).
- Semaphor 4y ago
  In their defense, they also don’t recommend running it on anything that can actually run normal Win 11.
- causality0 4y ago
  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. Taking up a lot of space on your drives for data to maintain backwards compatibility makes sense. Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM?
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    > Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM? There's no need, which is why it doesn't.
    - ninkendo 4y ago
      Given that the premise of this discussion is how Tiny11 credits removing WinSXS as part of the reason they were able to free up the memory, it would appear the article (and OP) disagree.
      - Dooflegna 4y ago
pancrufty 4y ago
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
- tlamponi 4y ago
  Well, Alpine Linux actually works with backward compat (as glibc can be easily installed) and uses a few dozens MiB of RAM. FWIW, I use Alpine Linux on my pinephone in the form of postmarketOS (an Alpine derivative) with a full-fledged KDE desktop, running Firefox alongside. IOW., you can use it as daily driver just fine, just need to install the respective packages - which naturally makes it use more resources, but even then far from what Windows will use.
- anthk 4y ago
  Alpine worked great in my netbook with 2GB of RAM. Advanced browser support, MESA 22 with GL 2.1 for the old iGPU, Libreoffice... everything basic ran faster than any typical distro. Alpine with XFCE + dhpcdp-ui as a "WiFi seeking menu" would run circles around Windows 11 using 1/10 of the same RAM. With Bluetooth support with Blueman and everything.
- kytazo 4y ago
  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.
abraxas 4y ago
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 processes has not grown in complexity by four orders of magnitude in 20 years.
- api 4y ago
  My favorite is Geos for the Commodore 64: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system... Obviously there were huge limitations but it shows what can be done. This fit on one 170K floppy and ran on a 1.44mhz 8 bit machine with 64K of RAM. In the 1990s I ran both Linux and Windows on less than 64M of RAM with IDEs, web browsers, games, and more. If I had to guess what were possible today I’d fall back on the fairly reliable 80/20 rule and posit that 20% of todays bloat is intrinsic to increases in capability and 80% is incidental complexity and waste.
  - weinzierl 4y ago
    For me also the Commodore came to mind. It had 64K RAM and a 64K address range, because other things had to fit in there not all RAM was usable at the same time. Clock frequency of the PAL model was 985kHz (yes KILO), so not even a full MHz. Yet, I could do * word processing * desktop publishing * working with scanned documents * spreadsheets * graphics * digital painting * music production * gaming (even chess) * programming (besides BASIC and ASM I had a Pascal compiler) * CAD and 3D design (Giga CAD [1], fascinated me to no end) * Video creation [2] For all this tasks there were standalone applications [3] with their own GUI [4]. GEOS was an integrated GUI environment with its own applications and way ahead of its times [5]. It still blows my mind how all this could work. My first Linux ran on a 386DX with 4M of RAM, but this probably as low as on can get. Even the installer choked on that little RAM and one had to create a swap partition and swapon manually after booting but before the installer ran. In text mode it was pretty usable though, X11 worked and I remember having GNU chess runnning, but it was quite slow. [1] https://youtu.be/ZEf9XMrc5u8 https://youtu.be/ZEf9XMrc5u8 [2] OK, this one is a bit of a stretch but there actually was Videofox for creating video titles and shopping window animations: https://www.pagetable.com/docs/scanntronik_manuals/videofox.pdf https://www.pagetable.com/docs/scanntronik_manuals/videofox.... [3] Some came on extension modules which saved RAM or brought a bit of extra RAM, but we are still talking kilobytes. For examples see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1730 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1730 [4] Or sort of TUI if you like; the strict separation of text and graphics mode wasn't a thing in the home computer era. [5] The standalone apps were still better. So, as advanced GEOS was, I believe it was not used productively much.
haunter 4y ago
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
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  What is the difference between IoT and normal LTSC?
  - haunter 4y ago
    Here is a handy reddit post when I was researching the same https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/comments/qw1qrs/ltsc_2021_vs_iot_ltsc_2021_tips_on_installations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/comments/qw1qrs/ltsc_... The main difference that IoT has longer lifecycle support, the activation method is different (but you don't even have to), and the IoT version is only available in english But it doesn't really matter they are virtually the same
    - avinassh 4y ago
      wait, can I use this as a daily driver on a laptop?
      - haunter 4y ago
        I use it to play games! It's totally perfect as a daily driver
      - smileybarry 4y ago
        You can try but it probably depends on the laptop and how messy your OEM's drivers are. (they might require/depend on some component carved out of the IoT editions)
- wkat4242 4y ago
  LTSC is no longer debloated. The latest version comes with the same crapware, Windows app store, "recommended" Microsoft account, telemetry that can't be turned off etc. It's just a stable version frozen in time but heralding it as the bloat-free alternative is no longer true. I have access to it through work and I gave it a spin recently but it's no longer what it used to be.
bsuvc 4y ago
How does this compare to a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu?
- asicsp 4y ago
  Just checked `free` on my Ubuntu desktop: 913MB for a browser with 3 tabs.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- stainablesteel 4y ago
  i used to run arch on a laptop with only 2 gb of ram and had zero problems for years, it was useful because it got great battery life memory was basically a non-issue unless i was trying to compile a large package, i don't recall the precise baseline it had after boot but it was probably around 12-25%
- camel-cdr 4y ago
  My daily driver Debian system idles at 400mb RAM usage. While writing this, it currently uses 1.2GB of RAM, with two browser windows, and about 40 tabs open. My vastly less powerful Manjaro arm Laptop with the same setup idles at 160MB. Most of the RAM seems to be used by systemd btw.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Lubuntu is not really "lightweight" in my experience. A really light Linux install uses maybe 0.2 GB RAM at the desktop, which lets you do some very basic web browsing even on a 1 GB system.
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    As someone that has built Linux (and various BSDs) "from scratch," your statement contains the biggest contradiction/problem. I can get a fully functionable desktop with GUI apps, generic hardware support (i.e. not locked down to my hardware), support for dynamic modules/drivers/libraries, audio, 3d-accelerated video, and more in a 300 MiB footprint (with only basic iso image compression) and runnable with 128 MiB of RAM. Then comes in the last part of your statement: "do some very basic web browsing." The system above works just fine with a browser featuring < 201x tech, with great CSS, JS, HTML support. But if I need to build and bundle the latest Firefox, Chrome, or whatever without manually stripping out a ton of features (beyond what is available via distro package managers), that footprint triples or quadruples in size and the memory requirements skyrocket.
mordae 4y ago
I've had access to cheap Windows for years, which is why I kept it around as a secondary OS on my desktop to get around the hassle of getting games run on Linux. Games are mostly play/finish/forget for me anyway. But since a few years back, most games I were interested in ran perfectly fine on Linux. I haven't rebooted into Windows for almost a year now. So I think I will, instead of upgrading to 11, eventually delete it and use the second SSD to hold my games on Linux and won't look back. I remember the days I have been building a bare metal recovery for some of our Windows systems using WinPE, imagex and Python. There was this feeling of sane people pouring into M$ to modernize the OS a little bit and cool stuff came out. But in the end, it's still the same inscrutable mess it always were. Nowadays with more and more ads and unnecessary fluff that gets in the way.
- neogodless 4y ago
  I'm not quite there but... my laptop is mostly just for gaming, with some email, chat and web browsing on the side. So I thought I'd allow Windows 10 to upgrade to 11 and see how it is. (It's not getting anywhere near my desktop!) But... Windows 11 is just... annoying. The UI is worse than 10 in all the ways that matter to me. So I finally put Linux Mint on this laptop, and it's been pretty good. Not flawless, but really good. By default, I install and play games on Steam. Notable exception is Anno 1800, which has a clunky multiplayer setup anyway, and just doesn't connect under Linux, but works (begrudingly) under Windows. Northgard has been awesome, but just tonight I had a bunch of server connection issues - can't 100% blame Linux, though 15 minutes into a multiplayer game, I was dropped while the two Windows players kept playing. But it's not conclusive! At any rate, I think for many PC gamers, Linux gaming would work, though it's still not 100% "install, join, play" for every game.
pkphilip 4y ago
I think there is a great market for a "debloated" windows from MS if sold directly from them
morpheos137 4y ago
Software desperately needs a concept of limited scope and finished version + maintenance. Continually adding features and complexity may make work for software developers but I think at a certain point we enter the negative utility territory.
squarefoot 4y ago
I think the two top questions lots of Windows users would like answered now are: 0- Did they also remove telemetry and similar malware? 1- Is it usable for gaming? I mean, didn't they also remove anything important among the cruft? I have memories of shrunk XP "distros" back in the day that were hacked to the point they refused to run a lot of software.
- nabakin 4y ago
  I have another one to add: does Windows Update work? I'd like to keep receiving security patches
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    It seems updating is possible only to some extent and done by hand. FTA: "This OS install “is not serviceable,” notes NTDev. “.NET, drivers and security definition updates can still be installed from Windows Update,” so this isn’t an install which you can set and forget. 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. If you install and enjoy Tiny11, we guess you will have to look out for ISO updates as major feature revisions of Windows 11 arrive."
    - nabakin 4y ago
      Thank you for the help. That's too bad
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Telemetry isn't malware.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    Depends upon your perspective.
  - gigel82 4y ago
grumpywndw_user 4y ago
Windows 10 pushed me to become a permanent macOS and linux resident. I don't know what went wrong but Windows 2000 was perfect, with 7 being almost as good.
- npteljes 4y ago
  What's wrong is not to realize that these are businesses, not endeavors to create the perfect operating system. Your incentives are just not aligned with Microsoft's, simple as that.
  - 10xDev 4y ago
    Good thing you can be both a business and still care about user experience.
    - npteljes 4y ago
      Yeah, I hope to see much of it! This got me thinking - I wonder what's the largest commercial entity that I'm considering good in this regard.
college_physics 4y ago
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
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  No, there should not. Otherwise every single app shop on earth is going to he paying it.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    So?
- 72deluxe 4y ago
  Try telling that to the users of Slack and other modern "desktop" applications that are simply web browsers with poorly-implemented UI elements attempting to mimic native UI elements (like menus). I wish your idea took off, but the modern "developer" (even with insane amounts of funding) seems capable of only writing memory-hogging garbage.
  - shortcake27 4y ago
    > the modern “developer” seems capable of only writing memory-hogging garbage. They’re perfectly capable of writing good software but actively choose not to. 1Password is the perfect example - lots of money, good engineers, a team who proved actually did write beautifully implemented native applications. Then they switched to Electron so they could avoid double-handling, and now users are faced with a laggy, buggy, janky, resource-intensive application.
- nine_k 4y ago
  > a penalty for gratuitous waste of resources It used to be the price of the hardware. Partly it still is: people won't use your software if they can't afford machines that are able to run it. But hardware gets cheaper. It's now more about power consumption: both as price of electricity and as battery life. But usually the "waste of resources" is "less time spent developing", that is, the users get to use some capability faster
lambdaxymox 4y ago
Are the enterprise versions of Windows 11 also filled with bloat? I got some keys second-hand for Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC a few years ago, installed it on some ten year old hardware at the time, and I was honestly surprised how responsive Windows could be absent (to the best of my knowledge) the telemetry software, Cortana, etc., and how fast it could boot. It's almost like the true blue good Windows experience without all the nonsense is secretly reserved for only business customers and pirates.
y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
Something like this would've been awesome a decade ago for Windows 8 when I was doing testing on netbooks with poor hardware. I'm on Windows 10. After running O&O ShutUp10, this OS has been as good as Windows 7. I can do all my software dev, gaming, video editing/graphic design, etc. on this operating system without issue. I don't think it's ever crashed on me. It genuinely makes me curious what kind of issues people are running into. After all these years being a power user of Windows, so far it's been a smooth ride. The last time I had trouble was with Windows XP and Windows ME before that. I skipped Vista and Windows 8 (except for working on netbooks at Intel back in the day). I tried Windows 11 in October 2021 and it was an awful mess. Tried too hard to appeal to MacOS and Linux users when that ship has long sailed. Not sure what state it's in now, but I've got no plans to upgrade until I either buy a new device or until Windows 10 gets some serious security vulnerability that's not on Windows 11.
pedro2 4y ago
I never thinned an OS since Windows XP (Black Viper, you rule!). Why put yourself in harms' way by using an unsupported configuration? I briefly consider O&O ShutUp 11 for shutting up Windows' telemetry. AFAI read, works reasonably well, but made Edge not start after some updates. I use Windows and Linux, for privacy concerns. If you want privacy, go for Mac (not that I'd do it). On mobile, still working out what are the best options.
indigodaddy 4y ago
I’m guessing there is no ARM/Pi version for this?..
- userbinator 4y ago
  From what I've seen, the ARM version of Windows is quite similar so you may be able to do the same things to it.
nerdjon 4y ago
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 Windows 10 on mine, used a debloat script to remove anything that was not strictly necessary for gaming, downloading games, and related tasks and I was able to get better performance and battery life for the same games than I did under SteamOS. While I imagine that this would complicate testing of updates to support these separate purposes, it feels like Windows is trying to do to much all at once. However I also recognize that much of what I removed is also things like telemetry that I doubt they would remove.
- hnarn 4y ago
  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.
  - nerdjon 4y ago
    I used this one https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater 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.
wnevets 4y ago
> 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.
- hedora 4y ago
  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.
hedora 4y ago
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.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  Maybe you are Ok with paying for every app or making do with open sources ones that do not benefit from ad revenue stream. Plus, you don't need maps, pay or cast support. But many other people like this features and if they don't, isn't it great that there are working AOSP builds for Pixel 6 Pro so that they can roll their own ROMs on top of that? No need to hack like for Windows 11.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Why would maps (get lat/long from GPS chip when navigating / searching), cast and pay need to burn battery when the phone is idle? (Also, third party implementations of maps, such as organic maps and here we go can install and run fine without impacting battery life when they are not running.) The answer is that the actually-useful features are bundled with mandatory malware that does need to run in the background in order to implement 24/7 surveillance. That bundling clearly violates US antitrust law. Also, I suspect most people buying > $1000 phones would be willing to pay 10’s of dollars for lifetime licenses for maps, pay and cast (which is roughly what they would cost as standalone products), especially if they were privacy preserving, and doubled the phone’s battery life.
  - petodo 4y ago
    maps work perfectly fine on my no gapps phone, so does Whatsapp or signal
- vbernat 4y ago
vmoore 4y ago
I just assume this 'release' has no malware or backdoors in it. I love the work of NTDev and even follow them on Twitter, but since this is closed source there's no way of eyeballing what changes have been made. I would run this an offline sandbox VM not connected to the Internet and for trying out different Windows software, but I wouldn't connect it to The Internet.
- hedora 4y ago
  The same could be said for official Windows builds, except we know for sure they contain malware and back doors. For instance, Microsoft engineers have the ability to pull arbitrary files off Windows 11 machines, at least according to Microsoft press releases from a few years ago. Doing so required “managerial approval”, and was “only for debugging software faults”, but anyone vaguely familiar with the US CLOUD act knows that they’re legally required to provide the same access to law enforcement searches.
  - smileybarry 4y ago
    > For instance, Microsoft engineers have the ability to pull arbitrary files off Windows 11 machines, at least according to Microsoft press releases from a few years ago. I seriously doubt it. Do you have a source for this?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
worble 4y ago
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 back to an abusive relationship.
- nateb2022 4y ago
  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 minimalistic un-featured XFCE-running underpowered Linux machine, you do your own thing. No need to force that on everyone else.
  - out-of-ideas 4y ago
    debloating does not mean "making it like XP/W7" - it means ripping out the horsecrap and unnecessairy components that are both unnecessairy and a waste of space and being able to control what goes on your system - sort of like what nix allows us to do; it also means having options to turn things on and off, ect. for the non tech savvy - windows is still a great choice for those wanting to simply game and not learn something new like linux - these are the same folks that do notice a difference in OS being bloating and see ads, while asking for help knowing others know more; which a lot of us do not have the time nor energy to fully support a vast array of friends' systems. these debloated windows are great for those folks, and for me not having to /shurg and have people buy more hdd space for nothing. was it not linus himself that mentioned that linux as a popular desktop os will not be a thing until manufactures who provide prebuild OS's (and support them) - ship them with linux? but in all honesty i fell that the X vs Wayland needs to be a bit more solidified, similarly with alsa/pulse/pipewire lol ; but those are different issues
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
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. Also, fewer components on each device means faster and less annoying updates / fewer embarrassing high profile hacks through exploits in components that the customer didn't need. Can also come up with a way to periodically purge components unused for extended time.
- neogodless 4y ago
  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.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
The post mentions that the Windows App Store is still available and can be used to get required apps as needed, but I don't think this is really correct. Component activation plays a huge role in "modern" UAP or WinRT-enabled applications and without WinSxS, I'm not sure how much of component activation will work. Obviously basic component activation is functional otherwise the shell wouldn't function (my biggest problem with WinRT/UAP: its insidious creep into the OS "internals" rather than just powering apps, widgets, add-ons, whatever on top of the base system), but I'm not sure how many apps you might pick at random from the app store will still work.
janosdebugs 4y ago
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!
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
nirav72 4y ago
This might come in handy as a VM.
jug 4y ago
A regular Windows 11 will also run on 2 GB of RAM. The official requirement is 4 GB because it'll stutter a lot otherwise, but there is no software block against it. This article claims the de-bloated Windows 11 will run "great" on 2 GB so I guess there's that... But I have to wonder according to which definition of "great" with a lack of benchmarks compared to the official requirements...
temporallobe 4y ago
Sure, and you could strip an average car down to its shell, steering wheel, throttle/brake controls, a seat, and probably get away with a 75 hp engine. Neat!
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
My biggest issue is disk bloat, I use many vms on my laptop, windows vms regularly end up 60+gb for a pretty standard deploy (windows+msvs or office). It normally comes down to a bloated winsxs folder, but I feel like attempting to fix that is playing with fire. Compare that to Linux, 10gb with a full gui, and minimal bloat after the fact and it’s extremely frustrating.
- firecall 4y ago
  Reminds me of the pain point I have with Windows Gaming PCs! Both my teenagers have 2x 1TB NVME drives installed to deal with the insane requirements of Steam, Epic and Xbox gamepass games. We live in Australia with ~25Mpbs download FTTN, so installing and uninstalling is a huge pain and isnt practical. I have a similar issue with Apple selling Macs with 256GB hard drives! Even with iCloud photo and docs offload, these Macs are close to useless as you'll constantly bump into storage issues.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    Apple cloud and Onedrive build conflicts of interest resulting in kneecapping local storage. Steam is another beast, you could consider a steam cache server or similar, or alternatively teaching your kids how to xfer unused games from primary storage to secondary, and drop a 6-10tb drive in each machine.
  - poopooracoocoo 4y ago
    Doesn't help that Epic Games has three instances of Chromium. Add that to Steam's and all of the games' instances and you've easily gotten at least 2 GB of duplicate instances of Chromium. Edge and Edge WebView, at least, are hard-linked, provided that they're the same version.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
Honestly, I just gave up after I bought my last computer, installed POP OS and installed Steam and have so far been able to play all my games without a single issue, except The Witcher 3 which only required a configuration change and I was golden. I will use Windows only on work machines but on personal machines its Linux for me from now on.
- ehcjrvakzjtbe 4y ago
  youre cursed like the rest of us and you will use windows only on work machines AND GAME MACHINES and linux for personal EDIT: spelling and attempted to adjust elegance
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    Not really Proton on Steam runs all my games just fine on Linux.
    - BirAdam 4y ago
      I use an Intel Arc A380 and on Linux it was using DXVK from day one, and therefore the performance issues Winders folks had weren’t a problem for me at all. It did get seriously better with kernel 6.2 recently though.
  - suprjami 4y ago
    Spot the guy who hasn't used Proton yet. It runs Windows games better than Windows does.
  - neogodless 4y ago
    I'm a recent (mostly) convert. So far Anno 1800 has an issue where multiplayer games only connect if I play on Windows (but single player runs flawlessly in Linux Mint.) Every other game I've played has been great. StarCraft II (in Bottles), Conan, Valheim, Northgard (so far.) PC gaming on Linux is not perfect, but it's really damn good. (This is on a Ryzen 7 + Geforce RTX laptop)
jksmith 4y ago
Why do I feel like the use case here is "Because unfortunately I can't use linux"?
westcort 4y ago
I would LOVE to see a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for intentionally making computers obsolete over time through bloated updates. It has personally cost me thousands and it’s about damn time.
imglorp 4y ago
It doesn't take much tinfoil to imagine hardware vendors appreciating bloated OSes: these drive the user up market by necessity. If everything stayed trim and fast, they'd have no reason to upgrade every year. In exchange for this favor, plus a little more grease, the OEMs were more willing to collect the MS Tax on every PC and lock out all others.
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
Windows at this point only exists to provide worse user experience on purpose and collect as much personal data as Microsoft possibly can. Not that I'm complaining though, I don't need Windows anymore and ZorinOS serves me just fine while not making me feel like I'm in a tech prison.
- philistine 4y ago
  Wow, the tech villain from the worst James Bond movie still sells an OS!
- qup 4y ago
  Have you used other flavors? Tell me about Zorin? I'm on Ubuntu out of mostly momentum, but it's slow as hell. I've used Debian, Arch, and Mandrake in the past. I'm a web-dev so I need all my dev packaging etc to work predictably, a good terminal emulator, and ideally firefox. I love slim systems so I'd really like to trim some fat.
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    ZorinOS is a no brainer for me, especially as a web dev. It's got everything I need and more. Ubuntu was a horrible experience for me, from the UI polish to the general UX. Here's a comment from me on Reddit, on why ZorinOS is a better choice than Ubuntu: https://www.reddit.com/r/zorinos/comments/10qtzi4/comment/j6s2hop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zorinos/comments/10qtzi4/comment/j6...
    - qup 4y ago
      Installing now. Thanks for the response.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
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
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
I feel like a new law needs to be named after this, maybe it already exists and I am just unaware of it, but 'basic computing functions and operating system requires expand to match the standard level of computing performance available" It's crazy how things that were considered basic many years ago so run well within the performance we have in modern systems, yet the basic system has requirements much higher than it used too. Teams is a massive example of this, is just text chat and video conferencing, stuff that was easily done 10 years or more ago, yet there are plenty of systems available today that run it like crap, let, alone imagining to run this on a ten year old system.
- npteljes 4y ago
  There's Andy and Bill's law: "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away". Reflecting on the fact that software will eat whatever resources are available. In a way, I think this reflects how life works in general. The way I see it, life expands until there's significant hindrance, or resources are exhausted. I don't mean it in a cynical way, like how Agent Smith does in the Matrix, regarding humanity, I just think that this is the nature of life in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
  - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
    Very good points, thanks.
imperialdrive 4y ago
Booted with less than 512MB ram just fine here. Wild. Technically it booted with 64MB but quickly hit errors. 32MB doesn't fly at all though.
nix23 4y ago
I just use O&O Appbuster and Shutup, it's safe and the ram usage goes massively down.
harha_ 4y ago
I will never upgrade to windows 11. I'm almost completely free of the burden of Windows 10 anyways, 90% of the things I do I can do on Gentoo linux. It's the 10% that forces me to still dualboot to windows...
unraveller 4y ago
This version is bloat compared to superlite 'divinity' (1.5GB iso capable of running smoothly on 1.5GB RAM, not serviceable) and x-lite 'resurgence' (2.5GB iso - fully upgradeable back to standard). Some quirks here and there but less clicks and less hassle than anything official. https://youtu.be/Nh7po_P8qNU https://youtu.be/Nh7po_P8qNU
MarkusWandel 4y ago
I think various Linux distributions would comfortably run in 2GB of RAM even without debloating. Until you start a web browser and open a few tabs. Then it doesn't matter how lean your OS is.
k__ 4y ago
This is still a thing? I remember using build tools to strip down Windows install CDs/DVDs back in the day to get the most performant and minimal installation possible.
newsclues 4y ago
Microsoft could make good money selling tuned versions of Windows for gamers. I won't buy a license for a windows gaming box, because it's trash. I would pay for a non-trash version of Windows.

474 points by smusamashah 4y ago

Previous submission [1] Is there a repo with the scripts and tools required to build these images from a bog standard Windows 11 ISO? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647699

RamRodification 4y ago
Curious as well. Installing a Windows version that some guy has messed with is out of the question for me. Maybe he has lots of cred on the scene and I'm overly cautious, I dunno.

debacle 4y ago

Windows 11 has some nice features but I am on 10 until they fix some things.

tester756 4y ago
Which? I've only noticed lack of right click on taskbar, which sucks, but I don't see other things that need fix
- chmod775 4y ago
  Can I put the taskbar along the left side of the screen yet?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    No, but I don't think they're ever going to change that back.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    In all seriousness, this is the main reason I haven't checked out 11 yet. Changing the position of the taskbar like this is "OS Smell", and I can't ever see 11 becoming more than the next ME/Vista/8.
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    No, Microsoft knows better than the user. "Nobody uses that feature, what are you, a Linux user!?" /s
- jaredhallen 4y ago
  The missing option to never combine taskbar buttons is really bugging me.
  - krembo 4y ago
    Being a pain for me as well, I ended up using apps to fix that like Explorer Patcher, StartAllBack or a registry hack I've just read about.
- RamRodification 4y ago
  Right-click menu on files missing all the actually useful stuff is a huge annoyance for me. I think there's some registry change that somewhat brings it all back, but IIRC it doesn't always give you the full menu anyway.
  - AlfeG 4y ago
    There is an Explorer Patcher tool on Github. It's doing pretty much great work for fixing Win11 issues!
    - RamRodification 4y ago
      Cool. Got a link?
  - tester756 4y ago
    oh, I've changed that right away after W11 update with single reg. change and since that it's fine

Someone1234 4y ago

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 good at and use it for that. Namely, "offline" Windows for some appliance-like usage (e.g. factory controls, display screens, et al) when Linux won't do for whatever reason and licensing Windows IoT isn't possible (small business/personal project/etc).

Semaphor 4y ago
In their defense, they also don’t recommend running it on anything that can actually run normal Win 11.
causality0 4y ago
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. Taking up a lot of space on your drives for data to maintain backwards compatibility makes sense. Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM?
- Someone1234 4y ago
  > Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM? There's no need, which is why it doesn't.
  - ninkendo 4y ago
    Given that the premise of this discussion is how Tiny11 credits removing WinSXS as part of the reason they were able to free up the memory, it would appear the article (and OP) disagree.
    - Dooflegna 4y ago

pancrufty 4y ago

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

tlamponi 4y ago
Well, Alpine Linux actually works with backward compat (as glibc can be easily installed) and uses a few dozens MiB of RAM. FWIW, I use Alpine Linux on my pinephone in the form of postmarketOS (an Alpine derivative) with a full-fledged KDE desktop, running Firefox alongside. IOW., you can use it as daily driver just fine, just need to install the respective packages - which naturally makes it use more resources, but even then far from what Windows will use.
anthk 4y ago
Alpine worked great in my netbook with 2GB of RAM. Advanced browser support, MESA 22 with GL 2.1 for the old iGPU, Libreoffice... everything basic ran faster than any typical distro. Alpine with XFCE + dhpcdp-ui as a "WiFi seeking menu" would run circles around Windows 11 using 1/10 of the same RAM. With Bluetooth support with Blueman and everything.
kytazo 4y ago
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.

abraxas 4y ago

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 processes has not grown in complexity by four orders of magnitude in 20 years.

api 4y ago
My favorite is Geos for the Commodore 64: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system... Obviously there were huge limitations but it shows what can be done. This fit on one 170K floppy and ran on a 1.44mhz 8 bit machine with 64K of RAM. In the 1990s I ran both Linux and Windows on less than 64M of RAM with IDEs, web browsers, games, and more. If I had to guess what were possible today I’d fall back on the fairly reliable 80/20 rule and posit that 20% of todays bloat is intrinsic to increases in capability and 80% is incidental complexity and waste.
- weinzierl 4y ago
  For me also the Commodore came to mind. It had 64K RAM and a 64K address range, because other things had to fit in there not all RAM was usable at the same time. Clock frequency of the PAL model was 985kHz (yes KILO), so not even a full MHz. Yet, I could do * word processing * desktop publishing * working with scanned documents * spreadsheets * graphics * digital painting * music production * gaming (even chess) * programming (besides BASIC and ASM I had a Pascal compiler) * CAD and 3D design (Giga CAD [1], fascinated me to no end) * Video creation [2] For all this tasks there were standalone applications [3] with their own GUI [4]. GEOS was an integrated GUI environment with its own applications and way ahead of its times [5]. It still blows my mind how all this could work. My first Linux ran on a 386DX with 4M of RAM, but this probably as low as on can get. Even the installer choked on that little RAM and one had to create a swap partition and swapon manually after booting but before the installer ran. In text mode it was pretty usable though, X11 worked and I remember having GNU chess runnning, but it was quite slow. [1] https://youtu.be/ZEf9XMrc5u8 https://youtu.be/ZEf9XMrc5u8 [2] OK, this one is a bit of a stretch but there actually was Videofox for creating video titles and shopping window animations: https://www.pagetable.com/docs/scanntronik_manuals/videofox.pdf https://www.pagetable.com/docs/scanntronik_manuals/videofox.... [3] Some came on extension modules which saved RAM or brought a bit of extra RAM, but we are still talking kilobytes. For examples see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1730 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1730 [4] Or sort of TUI if you like; the strict separation of text and graphics mode wasn't a thing in the home computer era. [5] The standalone apps were still better. So, as advanced GEOS was, I believe it was not used productively much.

haunter 4y ago

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

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
What is the difference between IoT and normal LTSC?
- haunter 4y ago
  Here is a handy reddit post when I was researching the same https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/comments/qw1qrs/ltsc_2021_vs_iot_ltsc_2021_tips_on_installations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/comments/qw1qrs/ltsc_... The main difference that IoT has longer lifecycle support, the activation method is different (but you don't even have to), and the IoT version is only available in english But it doesn't really matter they are virtually the same
  - avinassh 4y ago
    wait, can I use this as a daily driver on a laptop?
    - haunter 4y ago
      I use it to play games! It's totally perfect as a daily driver
    - smileybarry 4y ago
      You can try but it probably depends on the laptop and how messy your OEM's drivers are. (they might require/depend on some component carved out of the IoT editions)
wkat4242 4y ago
LTSC is no longer debloated. The latest version comes with the same crapware, Windows app store, "recommended" Microsoft account, telemetry that can't be turned off etc. It's just a stable version frozen in time but heralding it as the bloat-free alternative is no longer true. I have access to it through work and I gave it a spin recently but it's no longer what it used to be.

bsuvc 4y ago

How does this compare to a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu?

asicsp 4y ago
Just checked `free` on my Ubuntu desktop: 913MB for a browser with 3 tabs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
stainablesteel 4y ago
i used to run arch on a laptop with only 2 gb of ram and had zero problems for years, it was useful because it got great battery life memory was basically a non-issue unless i was trying to compile a large package, i don't recall the precise baseline it had after boot but it was probably around 12-25%
camel-cdr 4y ago
My daily driver Debian system idles at 400mb RAM usage. While writing this, it currently uses 1.2GB of RAM, with two browser windows, and about 40 tabs open. My vastly less powerful Manjaro arm Laptop with the same setup idles at 160MB. Most of the RAM seems to be used by systemd btw.
zozbot234 4y ago
Lubuntu is not really "lightweight" in my experience. A really light Linux install uses maybe 0.2 GB RAM at the desktop, which lets you do some very basic web browsing even on a 1 GB system.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  As someone that has built Linux (and various BSDs) "from scratch," your statement contains the biggest contradiction/problem. I can get a fully functionable desktop with GUI apps, generic hardware support (i.e. not locked down to my hardware), support for dynamic modules/drivers/libraries, audio, 3d-accelerated video, and more in a 300 MiB footprint (with only basic iso image compression) and runnable with 128 MiB of RAM. Then comes in the last part of your statement: "do some very basic web browsing." The system above works just fine with a browser featuring < 201x tech, with great CSS, JS, HTML support. But if I need to build and bundle the latest Firefox, Chrome, or whatever without manually stripping out a ton of features (beyond what is available via distro package managers), that footprint triples or quadruples in size and the memory requirements skyrocket.

mordae 4y ago

I've had access to cheap Windows for years, which is why I kept it around as a secondary OS on my desktop to get around the hassle of getting games run on Linux. Games are mostly play/finish/forget for me anyway. But since a few years back, most games I were interested in ran perfectly fine on Linux. I haven't rebooted into Windows for almost a year now. So I think I will, instead of upgrading to 11, eventually delete it and use the second SSD to hold my games on Linux and won't look back. I remember the days I have been building a bare metal recovery for some of our Windows systems using WinPE, imagex and Python. There was this feeling of sane people pouring into M$ to modernize the OS a little bit and cool stuff came out. But in the end, it's still the same inscrutable mess it always were. Nowadays with more and more ads and unnecessary fluff that gets in the way.

neogodless 4y ago
I'm not quite there but... my laptop is mostly just for gaming, with some email, chat and web browsing on the side. So I thought I'd allow Windows 10 to upgrade to 11 and see how it is. (It's not getting anywhere near my desktop!) But... Windows 11 is just... annoying. The UI is worse than 10 in all the ways that matter to me. So I finally put Linux Mint on this laptop, and it's been pretty good. Not flawless, but really good. By default, I install and play games on Steam. Notable exception is Anno 1800, which has a clunky multiplayer setup anyway, and just doesn't connect under Linux, but works (begrudingly) under Windows. Northgard has been awesome, but just tonight I had a bunch of server connection issues - can't 100% blame Linux, though 15 minutes into a multiplayer game, I was dropped while the two Windows players kept playing. But it's not conclusive! At any rate, I think for many PC gamers, Linux gaming would work, though it's still not 100% "install, join, play" for every game.

pkphilip 4y ago

I think there is a great market for a "debloated" windows from MS if sold directly from them

morpheos137 4y ago

Software desperately needs a concept of limited scope and finished version + maintenance. Continually adding features and complexity may make work for software developers but I think at a certain point we enter the negative utility territory.

squarefoot 4y ago

I think the two top questions lots of Windows users would like answered now are: 0- Did they also remove telemetry and similar malware? 1- Is it usable for gaming? I mean, didn't they also remove anything important among the cruft? I have memories of shrunk XP "distros" back in the day that were hacked to the point they refused to run a lot of software.

nabakin 4y ago
I have another one to add: does Windows Update work? I'd like to keep receiving security patches
- squarefoot 4y ago
  It seems updating is possible only to some extent and done by hand. FTA: "This OS install “is not serviceable,” notes NTDev. “.NET, drivers and security definition updates can still be installed from Windows Update,” so this isn’t an install which you can set and forget. 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. If you install and enjoy Tiny11, we guess you will have to look out for ISO updates as major feature revisions of Windows 11 arrive."
  - nabakin 4y ago
    Thank you for the help. That's too bad
phendrenad2 4y ago
Telemetry isn't malware.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Depends upon your perspective.
- gigel82 4y ago

grumpywndw_user 4y ago

Windows 10 pushed me to become a permanent macOS and linux resident. I don't know what went wrong but Windows 2000 was perfect, with 7 being almost as good.

npteljes 4y ago
What's wrong is not to realize that these are businesses, not endeavors to create the perfect operating system. Your incentives are just not aligned with Microsoft's, simple as that.
- 10xDev 4y ago
  Good thing you can be both a business and still care about user experience.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    Yeah, I hope to see much of it! This got me thinking - I wonder what's the largest commercial entity that I'm considering good in this regard.

college_physics 4y ago

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

phendrenad2 4y ago
No, there should not. Otherwise every single app shop on earth is going to he paying it.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  So?
72deluxe 4y ago
Try telling that to the users of Slack and other modern "desktop" applications that are simply web browsers with poorly-implemented UI elements attempting to mimic native UI elements (like menus). I wish your idea took off, but the modern "developer" (even with insane amounts of funding) seems capable of only writing memory-hogging garbage.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  > the modern “developer” seems capable of only writing memory-hogging garbage. They’re perfectly capable of writing good software but actively choose not to. 1Password is the perfect example - lots of money, good engineers, a team who proved actually did write beautifully implemented native applications. Then they switched to Electron so they could avoid double-handling, and now users are faced with a laggy, buggy, janky, resource-intensive application.
nine_k 4y ago
> a penalty for gratuitous waste of resources It used to be the price of the hardware. Partly it still is: people won't use your software if they can't afford machines that are able to run it. But hardware gets cheaper. It's now more about power consumption: both as price of electricity and as battery life. But usually the "waste of resources" is "less time spent developing", that is, the users get to use some capability faster

lambdaxymox 4y ago

Are the enterprise versions of Windows 11 also filled with bloat? I got some keys second-hand for Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC a few years ago, installed it on some ten year old hardware at the time, and I was honestly surprised how responsive Windows could be absent (to the best of my knowledge) the telemetry software, Cortana, etc., and how fast it could boot. It's almost like the true blue good Windows experience without all the nonsense is secretly reserved for only business customers and pirates.

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago

Something like this would've been awesome a decade ago for Windows 8 when I was doing testing on netbooks with poor hardware. I'm on Windows 10. After running O&O ShutUp10, this OS has been as good as Windows 7. I can do all my software dev, gaming, video editing/graphic design, etc. on this operating system without issue. I don't think it's ever crashed on me. It genuinely makes me curious what kind of issues people are running into. After all these years being a power user of Windows, so far it's been a smooth ride. The last time I had trouble was with Windows XP and Windows ME before that. I skipped Vista and Windows 8 (except for working on netbooks at Intel back in the day). I tried Windows 11 in October 2021 and it was an awful mess. Tried too hard to appeal to MacOS and Linux users when that ship has long sailed. Not sure what state it's in now, but I've got no plans to upgrade until I either buy a new device or until Windows 10 gets some serious security vulnerability that's not on Windows 11.

pedro2 4y ago

I never thinned an OS since Windows XP (Black Viper, you rule!). Why put yourself in harms' way by using an unsupported configuration? I briefly consider O&O ShutUp 11 for shutting up Windows' telemetry. AFAI read, works reasonably well, but made Edge not start after some updates. I use Windows and Linux, for privacy concerns. If you want privacy, go for Mac (not that I'd do it). On mobile, still working out what are the best options.

indigodaddy 4y ago

I’m guessing there is no ARM/Pi version for this?..

userbinator 4y ago
From what I've seen, the ARM version of Windows is quite similar so you may be able to do the same things to it.

nerdjon 4y ago

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 Windows 10 on mine, used a debloat script to remove anything that was not strictly necessary for gaming, downloading games, and related tasks and I was able to get better performance and battery life for the same games than I did under SteamOS. While I imagine that this would complicate testing of updates to support these separate purposes, it feels like Windows is trying to do to much all at once. However I also recognize that much of what I removed is also things like telemetry that I doubt they would remove.

hnarn 4y ago
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.
- nerdjon 4y ago
  I used this one https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater 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.

wnevets 4y ago

> 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.

hedora 4y ago
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.

hedora 4y ago

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.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Maybe you are Ok with paying for every app or making do with open sources ones that do not benefit from ad revenue stream. Plus, you don't need maps, pay or cast support. But many other people like this features and if they don't, isn't it great that there are working AOSP builds for Pixel 6 Pro so that they can roll their own ROMs on top of that? No need to hack like for Windows 11.
- hedora 4y ago
  Why would maps (get lat/long from GPS chip when navigating / searching), cast and pay need to burn battery when the phone is idle? (Also, third party implementations of maps, such as organic maps and here we go can install and run fine without impacting battery life when they are not running.) The answer is that the actually-useful features are bundled with mandatory malware that does need to run in the background in order to implement 24/7 surveillance. That bundling clearly violates US antitrust law. Also, I suspect most people buying > $1000 phones would be willing to pay 10’s of dollars for lifetime licenses for maps, pay and cast (which is roughly what they would cost as standalone products), especially if they were privacy preserving, and doubled the phone’s battery life.
- petodo 4y ago
  maps work perfectly fine on my no gapps phone, so does Whatsapp or signal
vbernat 4y ago

vmoore 4y ago

I just assume this 'release' has no malware or backdoors in it. I love the work of NTDev and even follow them on Twitter, but since this is closed source there's no way of eyeballing what changes have been made. I would run this an offline sandbox VM not connected to the Internet and for trying out different Windows software, but I wouldn't connect it to The Internet.

hedora 4y ago
The same could be said for official Windows builds, except we know for sure they contain malware and back doors. For instance, Microsoft engineers have the ability to pull arbitrary files off Windows 11 machines, at least according to Microsoft press releases from a few years ago. Doing so required “managerial approval”, and was “only for debugging software faults”, but anyone vaguely familiar with the US CLOUD act knows that they’re legally required to provide the same access to law enforcement searches.
- smileybarry 4y ago
  > For instance, Microsoft engineers have the ability to pull arbitrary files off Windows 11 machines, at least according to Microsoft press releases from a few years ago. I seriously doubt it. Do you have a source for this?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

worble 4y ago

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 back to an abusive relationship.

nateb2022 4y ago
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 minimalistic un-featured XFCE-running underpowered Linux machine, you do your own thing. No need to force that on everyone else.
- out-of-ideas 4y ago
  debloating does not mean "making it like XP/W7" - it means ripping out the horsecrap and unnecessairy components that are both unnecessairy and a waste of space and being able to control what goes on your system - sort of like what nix allows us to do; it also means having options to turn things on and off, ect. for the non tech savvy - windows is still a great choice for those wanting to simply game and not learn something new like linux - these are the same folks that do notice a difference in OS being bloating and see ads, while asking for help knowing others know more; which a lot of us do not have the time nor energy to fully support a vast array of friends' systems. these debloated windows are great for those folks, and for me not having to /shurg and have people buy more hdd space for nothing. was it not linus himself that mentioned that linux as a popular desktop os will not be a thing until manufactures who provide prebuild OS's (and support them) - ship them with linux? but in all honesty i fell that the X vs Wayland needs to be a bit more solidified, similarly with alsa/pulse/pipewire lol ; but those are different issues

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

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. Also, fewer components on each device means faster and less annoying updates / fewer embarrassing high profile hacks through exploits in components that the customer didn't need. Can also come up with a way to periodically purge components unused for extended time.

neogodless 4y ago
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.

ComputerGuru 4y ago

The post mentions that the Windows App Store is still available and can be used to get required apps as needed, but I don't think this is really correct. Component activation plays a huge role in "modern" UAP or WinRT-enabled applications and without WinSxS, I'm not sure how much of component activation will work. Obviously basic component activation is functional otherwise the shell wouldn't function (my biggest problem with WinRT/UAP: its insidious creep into the OS "internals" rather than just powering apps, widgets, add-ons, whatever on top of the base system), but I'm not sure how many apps you might pick at random from the app store will still work.

janosdebugs 4y ago

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!

mixmastamyk 4y ago
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."

nirav72 4y ago

This might come in handy as a VM.

jug 4y ago

A regular Windows 11 will also run on 2 GB of RAM. The official requirement is 4 GB because it'll stutter a lot otherwise, but there is no software block against it. This article claims the de-bloated Windows 11 will run "great" on 2 GB so I guess there's that... But I have to wonder according to which definition of "great" with a lack of benchmarks compared to the official requirements...

temporallobe 4y ago

Sure, and you could strip an average car down to its shell, steering wheel, throttle/brake controls, a seat, and probably get away with a 75 hp engine. Neat!

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago

My biggest issue is disk bloat, I use many vms on my laptop, windows vms regularly end up 60+gb for a pretty standard deploy (windows+msvs or office). It normally comes down to a bloated winsxs folder, but I feel like attempting to fix that is playing with fire. Compare that to Linux, 10gb with a full gui, and minimal bloat after the fact and it’s extremely frustrating.

firecall 4y ago
Reminds me of the pain point I have with Windows Gaming PCs! Both my teenagers have 2x 1TB NVME drives installed to deal with the insane requirements of Steam, Epic and Xbox gamepass games. We live in Australia with ~25Mpbs download FTTN, so installing and uninstalling is a huge pain and isnt practical. I have a similar issue with Apple selling Macs with 256GB hard drives! Even with iCloud photo and docs offload, these Macs are close to useless as you'll constantly bump into storage issues.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  Apple cloud and Onedrive build conflicts of interest resulting in kneecapping local storage. Steam is another beast, you could consider a steam cache server or similar, or alternatively teaching your kids how to xfer unused games from primary storage to secondary, and drop a 6-10tb drive in each machine.
- poopooracoocoo 4y ago
  Doesn't help that Epic Games has three instances of Chromium. Add that to Steam's and all of the games' instances and you've easily gotten at least 2 GB of duplicate instances of Chromium. Edge and Edge WebView, at least, are hard-linked, provided that they're the same version.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

Honestly, I just gave up after I bought my last computer, installed POP OS and installed Steam and have so far been able to play all my games without a single issue, except The Witcher 3 which only required a configuration change and I was golden. I will use Windows only on work machines but on personal machines its Linux for me from now on.

ehcjrvakzjtbe 4y ago
youre cursed like the rest of us and you will use windows only on work machines AND GAME MACHINES and linux for personal EDIT: spelling and attempted to adjust elegance
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  Not really Proton on Steam runs all my games just fine on Linux.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    I use an Intel Arc A380 and on Linux it was using DXVK from day one, and therefore the performance issues Winders folks had weren’t a problem for me at all. It did get seriously better with kernel 6.2 recently though.
- suprjami 4y ago
  Spot the guy who hasn't used Proton yet. It runs Windows games better than Windows does.
- neogodless 4y ago
  I'm a recent (mostly) convert. So far Anno 1800 has an issue where multiplayer games only connect if I play on Windows (but single player runs flawlessly in Linux Mint.) Every other game I've played has been great. StarCraft II (in Bottles), Conan, Valheim, Northgard (so far.) PC gaming on Linux is not perfect, but it's really damn good. (This is on a Ryzen 7 + Geforce RTX laptop)

jksmith 4y ago

Why do I feel like the use case here is "Because unfortunately I can't use linux"?

westcort 4y ago

I would LOVE to see a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for intentionally making computers obsolete over time through bloated updates. It has personally cost me thousands and it’s about damn time.

imglorp 4y ago

It doesn't take much tinfoil to imagine hardware vendors appreciating bloated OSes: these drive the user up market by necessity. If everything stayed trim and fast, they'd have no reason to upgrade every year. In exchange for this favor, plus a little more grease, the OEMs were more willing to collect the MS Tax on every PC and lock out all others.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

Windows at this point only exists to provide worse user experience on purpose and collect as much personal data as Microsoft possibly can. Not that I'm complaining though, I don't need Windows anymore and ZorinOS serves me just fine while not making me feel like I'm in a tech prison.

philistine 4y ago
Wow, the tech villain from the worst James Bond movie still sells an OS!
qup 4y ago
Have you used other flavors? Tell me about Zorin? I'm on Ubuntu out of mostly momentum, but it's slow as hell. I've used Debian, Arch, and Mandrake in the past. I'm a web-dev so I need all my dev packaging etc to work predictably, a good terminal emulator, and ideally firefox. I love slim systems so I'd really like to trim some fat.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  ZorinOS is a no brainer for me, especially as a web dev. It's got everything I need and more. Ubuntu was a horrible experience for me, from the UI polish to the general UX. Here's a comment from me on Reddit, on why ZorinOS is a better choice than Ubuntu: https://www.reddit.com/r/zorinos/comments/10qtzi4/comment/j6s2hop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zorinos/comments/10qtzi4/comment/j6...
  - qup 4y ago
    Installing now. Thanks for the response.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

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

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

I feel like a new law needs to be named after this, maybe it already exists and I am just unaware of it, but 'basic computing functions and operating system requires expand to match the standard level of computing performance available" It's crazy how things that were considered basic many years ago so run well within the performance we have in modern systems, yet the basic system has requirements much higher than it used too. Teams is a massive example of this, is just text chat and video conferencing, stuff that was easily done 10 years or more ago, yet there are plenty of systems available today that run it like crap, let, alone imagining to run this on a ten year old system.

npteljes 4y ago
There's Andy and Bill's law: "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away". Reflecting on the fact that software will eat whatever resources are available. In a way, I think this reflects how life works in general. The way I see it, life expands until there's significant hindrance, or resources are exhausted. I don't mean it in a cynical way, like how Agent Smith does in the Matrix, regarding humanity, I just think that this is the nature of life in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Very good points, thanks.

imperialdrive 4y ago

Booted with less than 512MB ram just fine here. Wild. Technically it booted with 64MB but quickly hit errors. 32MB doesn't fly at all though.

nix23 4y ago

I just use O&O Appbuster and Shutup, it's safe and the ram usage goes massively down.

harha_ 4y ago

I will never upgrade to windows 11. I'm almost completely free of the burden of Windows 10 anyways, 90% of the things I do I can do on Gentoo linux. It's the 10% that forces me to still dualboot to windows...

unraveller 4y ago

This version is bloat compared to superlite 'divinity' (1.5GB iso capable of running smoothly on 1.5GB RAM, not serviceable) and x-lite 'resurgence' (2.5GB iso - fully upgradeable back to standard). Some quirks here and there but less clicks and less hassle than anything official. https://youtu.be/Nh7po_P8qNU https://youtu.be/Nh7po_P8qNU

MarkusWandel 4y ago

I think various Linux distributions would comfortably run in 2GB of RAM even without debloating. Until you start a web browser and open a few tabs. Then it doesn't matter how lean your OS is.

k__ 4y ago

This is still a thing? I remember using build tools to strip down Windows install CDs/DVDs back in the day to get the most performant and minimal installation possible.

newsclues 4y ago

Microsoft could make good money selling tuned versions of Windows for gamers. I won't buy a license for a windows gaming box, because it's trash. I would pay for a non-trash version of Windows.