De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
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.
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
[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....
[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
[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.
But if you had to use that software now, you'd say (justly) that it's extremely basic and limited, and that interoperability with other systems is not great.
What can be done ≠ what's comfortable to use.
For me it's more about the excitement that the bright future lay ahead of us so clearly mixed with a slight disappointment that I sometimes feel we could have made more out of it.
Linux with a lightweight GUI for example can still run okay with just 128MB. I ran Debian with LXDE on an old IBM T22, and it worked perfectly well. Running Firefox was a problem (but did eventually work), but something more stripped down like NetSurf or Dillo is blazingly fast.
[1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
[2] https://noscript.net/getit/ [scroll down to bottom, note there is no support]
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy
Also, there's a forked dillo called dillo-ng
https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG
with mpv support on context menu that works fine with these sites:
https://simple-web.org/projects/simplytranslate.html
https://simple-web.org/ (several services without js). On the Invidious video links, simply right click the link and choose open with mpv".
Also, on Gopher (lynx it's good for this) gopher://magical.fish has a huge service list usable on text mode.
Not going to defend particular implementations, but requirements? Those have definitely grown more than we give them credit.
that said 2GB is acceptable considering the state of everything
not saying i wouldn't like to have QNX class back
That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly.
> 3D everything
That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM.
> accessibility
Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do.
> fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features
That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for a very long time. MFC has existed for an even longer time.
> support for large amounts of devices
No one asked for Windows on touchscreen anything. Microsoft decided that themselves and ruined the UX for the remaining 99% of the users that still use a mouse and a keyboard.
> backwards compatibility
That's what Microsoft does historically, nothing new here.
> browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves
No one asked for this. My personal opinion is that everything app-like about browsers needs to be undone, yesterday, and they should again become the hypertext document viewers they were meant to be. Even JS is too much, but I guess it does have to stay.
The UI has to be designed from the ground up to support accessibility.
Also, disability may not be permanent. I recently underwent major surgery and for at least a few days afterwards using my cell phone was nearly impossible. I resorted voice control a few times because I did not have the coordination or cognitive function to type. (Aside: cell phones in general are accessibility dumpster fires, but it took a major life event to demonstrate to me how bad it really is.)
So no, accessibility is not just a toggle switch or installable library. In fact, I hope future UI design incorporates some kind of non-intrusive learning and adaptability, such that when the system detects the user continually making certain kinds of errors, the UI will adapt to help.
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.
I think you have to reason this one out. Your statement, to me, doesn’t hold water.
Let’s start with HDR. That requires the content that’s being rendered to have higher bit depth. Not all of this is stored in GPU memory at once, a lot is stored in system RAM and shuffled in and out.
Now take fluid animations. The interpolation of positions isn’t done solely on the GPU. It’s coordinated by the CPU. I don’t think this one necessarily adds ram usage but I think your comment is incorrect.
And lastly with resolutions, the GPU is only responsible for the processing and output. You still need high resolution data going in. This is easily observed by viewing any low resolution image. It will be heavily blurred or pixelated on a high resolution screen. That stands to reason that the OS needs to have high enough resolution assets to accommodate high resolution screens. Now these aren’t all stored on disc necessarily as high resolution graphics but they have to be stored in memory as such.
——
As to the rest of your points, they basically boil down to: I don’t want it so I don’t see why a default install should have it. Other people do want a highly feature full browser that can keep up with the modern web. And given that webviews are a huge part of application rendering today, the browser actively contributes to memory usage.
Could we stop shuffling it out? Do more of the work there, directly?
The more work you do on the GPU, the more you need to shuffle because the more GPU memory you’d use AND the more state you’d need to check back on the CPU side, causing sync stalls. It’s not insurmountable, and macOS puts a lot more of its work on the GPU for example. Windows is a little more conservative in that regard.
Here are some more confounding factors:
- Every app needs one or more buffers to draw into. Especially with hidpi screens this can eat up memory quick. The compositor can juggle these to try and get some efficiency, but it can’t move all the state to the GPU due to latency.
- you also need to deal with swap memory. You’d ultimately need to shuffle date back to the system ram and then to disk and back which is fairly slow. It’s much better theoretically on APUs though.
Theoretically, APUs stand to solve a lot of these issues because they blur the lines of GPU and CPU memory.
It’s largely applicable mainly to games where resource access is known ahead of time.
HDR can still fit in 32bit pixels. At 4k X 2k we have 8 megapixels or 32MB frame buffer. With triple buffering that's still under 100MB. Video games have been doing all sorts of animation for decades. It's not a lot of code and a modern CPU can actually composite a desktop in software pretty well. We use the GPU for speed, but that doesn't have to mean more memory.
The difference between 2000 and 2023 is the quantity of data to move and like I said, that about 100MB
You didn't ask. It is, as you say, your personal opinion.
From my POV, current Web is fine and the fact that browsers are powerful liberated us from writing specialized desktop apps for various OSes. I am much happier writing a Web UI than hacking together Win32 or Qt-based apps. Or, God forbid, AVKON Symbian OS UI. That was its own circle of hell.
I use macOS and I very much dislike anything built with cross-platform GUI toolkits, and especially the web stack. And it's always painfully obvious when something is not native. It doesn't behave like the rest of the system. It's not mac-like. It draws its own buttons from scratch and does its own event handling on them instead of using NSButton. I don't want that kind of "liberation". I want proper, native, consistent apps. Most other people probably do too, they just don't realize that or can't put it into words.
The only counter-example out there known to me is IntelliJ-based IDEs. They're built with Swing, but they do somehow feel native enough.
Also, developer experience is not a something users care about. And I'm saying that as a developer myself. Do use fancy tools to make your job easier, sure, but avoid those of them that stay inside your product when you ship it.
macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader support, as well as all of the things you're complaining about in your original comment at the top of this thread. Clearly those things are absolutely gobbling memory, and yet you don't seem to connect the dots that they're directly contributing to high memory requirements of macOS?
I mean, 8GB on stock machines today is barely manageable. You can't buy a Mac with less than 8GB today; you can't even buy a phone with 2GB or less. I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against high-memory bloat in computing today.
p.s. I say this as someone who uses macOS as their daily driver and has for a very long time
Running several instances of Chromium though... You'll probably run one anyway at all times as your actual web browser, but additional ones in the form of "oh so easy to build" Electron apps don't help. In Apple's eyes, though, you should absolutely ignore other browsers and use Safari exclusively. It might not be as much of a memory hog as Chrome — I haven't researched this, this is simply my guesses.
I also heard that M1 Macs are better at memory management compared to Intel. Again, I don't have any concrete evidence to back this up, but knowing Apple, it's believable.
Nobody is a hypocrite for buying X gigabytes of ram but also wanting the naked operating system to use a much smaller amount, or wanting single programs to use a much smaller amount.
> macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader support, as well as all of the things you're complaining about in your original comment at the top of this thread. Clearly those things are absolutely gobbling memory, and yet you don't seem to connect the dots that they're directly contributing to high memory requirements of macOS?
What makes a screen reader gobble memory?
And it definitely shouldn't gobble memory when it's not running.
Users might not care about developer experience, but everything is a trade off: developer time is a cost, the cost of producing software is an input into how much it needs to cost. Users seem to want features delivered quickly, without much regard to implementation quality.
But I understand, that most of my complains are complains of power user with 25+ years of experience and muscle memory, and I'm not target auditory for almost any new app. You win :-(
a) nice looking, but less capable apps,
b) more expensive apps, or, apps that have to be paid even if they could be free in an alternate universe,
c) limited availability - app X only exists for Windows and not Mac, because either a Mac programmer isn't available or would be too expensive.
Developing for multiple UIs at once is both prone to errors and more expensive, you wind up paying for extra developers, extra testers/QA, extra hardware and possibly extra IDEs and various fees. Such extra cost may be negligible for Google, but is absolutely a factor for small software houses outside the richest countries, much more so for "one person shows" and various underfunded OSS projects.
I remember the hell that was Nokia Series 60 and 90 programming. Nokia churned out a deluge of devices that theoretically shared the same OS, but they had so many device-specific quirks and oddities on the UI level that you spent most of the time fighting with (bad) emulators of devices you could not afford to buy. This is the other extreme and I am happy that it seems to be gone forever.
OSS projects are completely different story, of course, no questions to OSS developers.
I prefer to pay $200 for native application than $100 for Electron one.
Oh, whom do I try to fool? Of course, it will be Electron app with $9.95/month subscription now :-(
As I said in my previous comment, this is quite expensive, and people inside Silicon Valley rarely understand how cash-strapped the software sector in the rest of the world is. In Czech, we have a saying "a person who is fed won't believe a hungry one" and SV veterans that are used to reams of VC cash supporting even lossy businesses like Uber have no idea that the excess spending needed to hire another developer for several months somewhere in Warsaw or Bucharest may kill a fledgling or small company.
In this, the unity of the Web is a life-saver.
But, again, I'm prefer to make one thing good than two things good enough.
I understand that bigger stuff and better graphics involve more RAM and the switch to 64 bit doubled the pointer sizes (which is why you can't meaningfully run Windows 7 x64 on 1GB of RAM like you can the 32 bit version) but with 4GB of system RAM you should be able to fit everything in and then some.
You actually can, as various Linux distributions demonstrate. The algorithms and APIs aren't as well developed, but better window control/accessibility APIs don't take up more than a megabyte of RAM.
People do ask for many Microsoft features, such as the appification of the interface and the Microsoft store. Just because you didn't ask for it, doesn't mean it's not necessary. However, Microsoft has known for years how to build and implement those requests in a much more compact environment.
My take is still the same old cynical one: as resources become cheaper, developers become lazier. I don't want to go back to the days of racing the beam with carefully planned instructions but the moment Electron gained any popularity the ecosystem went too far. "Yes but our customers want features more than a small footprint" is the common excuses I hear, but that's ignoring all the people calling various support channels or just being miserable with their terribly slow machine.
At most places I've worked it's a struggle to get time allocated towards necessary refactoring that'll ensure new features can be delivered in a timely fashion.
I'd love to spend time making the product more efficient but unless I can demonstrate immediate and tangible business value in doing so, it's never going to be approved over working on new features.
Compiz ran fine with a 128MB GPU and 512MB of RAM.
Now that I think about it, Mac OSX was doing GPU compositing back in 2000/2001 and those machine usually only had about 16MB of VRAM. I remember it running fairly well on a 2005 MacMini G4 with 32MB of VRAM.
I have several devices, including a couple Linux PC's, an M1 macbook air, and a Microsoft Surface Go. If Windows 11 didn't support touchscreens, I would have gone with an iPad. However, Windows 11 is the _best_ touchscreen OS to-date.
Unlike iOS or iPadOS, Windows 11 runs desktop apps and combines the convenience of touchscreen scrolling/interaction with the desktop experience. Windows 11 does this very, very well.
I don't use Windows anymore but I remember thinking "this is exactly what I've always wanted from a convertible/touch-support-in-desktop OS"...
But this of course is in the metrics of how you measure. Windows 3.1 for example was a huge crashing piece of crap that was locking up all the damned time. MacOS at the time wasn't that much better. Now I can leave windows up for a month at a time between security reboots. Specialized Windows and Linux machines in server environments on a reduced patching schedule will stay up far longer, but generally security updates are what limits the uptime.
I remember running Windows applications and receiving buffer overflow errors back then. If you got a buffer overflow message today you'd think that either your hardware is going bad or someone wrote a terrible security flaw into your application. And back there were security flaws everywhere. 'Smashing the stack for fun and profit' wasn't wrote till '95, well after consumers had started getting on the internet in mass. And if you were using applications like Word or Excel you could expect to measure 'crashes' per week rather than the crashes per month, many of which are completely recoverable in applications like office.
This needs application support, by this broad definition all operating systems "saves state and comes back right where you started on a security update reboot".
> No one asked for this. My personal opinion is that everything app-like about browsers needs to be undone, yesterday, and they should again become the hypertext document viewers they were meant to be. Even JS is too much, but I guess it does have to stay.
People did ask for this, because it made them a lot of money.
You should recognize your opinion is a minority one outside of tech (and possibly, there too).
To wit, virtually no one is jumping to Gopher or Gemini.
What people want is a way to run amazon.com (and gmail and slack and so on), on any of their devices, securely, and without the fuss of installing anything.
Ideally the first-time use of amazon.com should involve nothing more than typing "amazon" and hitting enter. It should to show content almost instantly.
Satisfying that user need doesn't require a web browser. If OS vendors provided a way to do that today, we'd be using it. But they don't.
OS vendors still don't understand that. They assume people forever want to install software via a package manager. They assume software developers care about their platform's special features enough to bother learning Kotlin / Swift / GTK / C# / whatever. And they assume all software users run should be trusted with all of my local files.
Why is docker popular? Because it lets you type the name of some software. The software is downloaded from the internet. The software runs on linux/mac/windows. And it runs in a sandbox. Just like the web.
The web - for all its flaws - is still the only platform which delivers that experience to end users.
I'd throw out javascript and the DOM and all that rubbish in a heartbeat if we had any better option.
Guess what, both GMail and Slack have video calls. They use WebRTC. The browser has to support it. So the WebRTC code is a part of it.
> Ideally the first-time use of amazon.com should involve nothing more than typing "amazon" and hitting enter. It should to show content almost instantly.
And it does. Open an incognito tab, type amazon.com, it's pretty crazy how fast it loads, with all the images.
Yes; that's my point. That's the bar native apps need to reach to be competitive with the web.
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 that would be very very hard to achieve if the apps weren't web native - especially given the need to share data along with the links, but in a way that doesn't break security. I would predict that if you tried to recreate a platform with similar capabilities, you would end up reinventing 90% of web tech (though hopefully with a saner GUI model than the awfulness of HTML+CSS+JS).
I'm not proposing that. I didn't propose any solution to this in my comment. For what its worth, I agree with you - another java swing style approach would be a terrible idea. And I have an irrational hate for docker.
If I were in solution mode, what I think we need is all the browser features to be added to desktop operating systems. And those features being:
- Cross platform apps of some kind
- The app should be able to run "directly" from the internet in a lightweight way like web pages do. I shouldn't need to install apps to run them.
- Fierce browser tab style sandboxing.
If the goal was to compete with the browser, apps would need to use mostly platform-native controls like browsers do. WASM would be my tool of choice at this point, since then people can make apps in any language.
Unfortunately, executing this well would probably cost 7-10 figures. And it'd probably need buy in from Apple, Google, Microsoft and maybe GTK and KDE people. (Since we'd want linux, macos, ios, android and windows versions of the UI libraries). Ideally this would all get embedded in the respective operating systems so users don't have to install anything special, otherwise the core appeal would be gone.
Who knows if it'll ever happen, or if we'll just be stuck with the web forever. But a man can dream.
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.
Then, you need to come up with some system of integrating this with, at a minimum, password managers, SAML and OAuth2, or you'll have something far less usable and secure than an equivalent web app. You'll probably have to integrate it with many more web technologies in fact, as people will eventually want to be able to show some web pages or web-formatted emails inside their apps.
So, my prediction is that any such effort will end-up reimplementing the browser, with little to no advantages when all is said and done.
Personally, I hate developing any web-like app. The GUI stack in particular is atrocious, with virtually no usable built-in controls, leading to a proliferation of toolkits and frameworks that do half the job and can't talk to each other. I'm hopeful that WASM will eventually allow more mature GUI frameworks to be used in web apps in a cross-platform manner, and we can forget about using a document markup language for designing application UIs. But otherwise, I think the web model is here to stay, and has in fact proven to be the most successful app ecosystem ever tried, by far (especially when counting the numerous iOS and Android apps that are entirely web views).
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.
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....
We could have lived in an alternative universe where we succeeded to teach people the basics of how to use the computer as a powerful tool for themselves.
Instead, corporations rushed to make most of the things super easy to make billions on the way.
I’d even say that this wasn’t really a problem until they realized that closed computers allowed them more control and more money.
So yeah, now we are stuck with web apps on closed systems and most people are happy with it, that’s true.
And, as the time passes, we are loosing the universal access to "the computer". Instead of a great tool for enabling power to the people, it’s being transformed to a prison to control what the people can do, see and even think.
ps : When I say "computer" I include PC, phones, tablets, voice assistants … everything with a processor running arbitrary programs.
I agree that JS is not a gold standard. Still it works most of the time and with typescript stapled on top it is acceptable.
Time has proven again and again (not only in tech) that the simple solutions will prevail. Want to change it? Build a simpler and better solution. I don't like that too but that's human nature at work.
Maybe, instead of shutting those opinions down, you should reflect on how you, in whatever capacity you serve our awful tech overlords, can work to make these voices more heard and included in software/feature design
There is a small resurgence of the gopher protocol that I believe is rooted in this sentiment.
Windows didn't really see a lot of actual progress in this area since the Win2k days. Lots of activity and churn yes, but little actual progress.
Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility framework with subpar but usable tooling built in, and excellent commercial applications to make use of the existing API, all the way back in Windows XP. Backwards compatibility hacks such as loading old memory manager behaviour and allocating extra buffer space for known buggy applications may take more RAM but don't increase any requirements.
Inagree that requirements have grown but not by the amount reflected in standby CPU and memory use. Don't forget that we've also gained near universal SSD availability, negating the need for RAM caches in many circumstances. And that's just ignoring the advance in CPU and GPU performance since the Windows XP days, when DOS was finally killed off and the amount of necessary custom tailored assembly drastically dropped.
When I boot a Windows XP machine, the only thing I can say I'm really missing as a user is application support. Alright, the Windows XP kernel was incredibly insecure, so let's upgrade to Windows 7 where the painful Vista driver days are behind us and the kernel has been reshaped to put a huge amount of vulnerable code in userspace. What am I missing now? Touchscreen and pen support works, 4k resolutions and higher are supported perfectly fine, almost all modern games still run.
The Steam hardware survey says it all. The largest target audience using their computer components the most runs one or two 1080p monitors, has 6 CPU cores and about 8GB of RAM. Your average consumer doesn't need or use all of that. HiDPI and HDR are a niche and designing your OS around a niche is stupid.
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.
and to be honest, nowadays the biggest issue is the web browser and the sheer amount of memory and processing that modern websites use.
it's unbelievable.
Browsers are still going to be the sticking point, but with agressive adblockers/noscript and hardware that's not terribly old (NVMe storage is priority 1), and you should be set.
But of course, snappiness isn't free and you have to spend some time doing first time set-ups and maintenance.
The problem is the web browser.
I’ve got 16 gb of ram and the browser is using most of them. I can literally see the swap space emptying when i have (as in “im forced to”) sacrifice my browsing session (xkill the browser) due to constant swap out to disk.
And I’m using a pci gen 3 nvme disk, and already lowered swappiness.
The problem is the web browser.
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?
At this point, my primary use case for ad blocking isn't the ad blocking itself, it is 1. the security of blocking ads, one of the worst vectors for attacks in the while and 2. the greatly reduced system resources my browser uses. The ad blocking itself is a further bonus.
May I remind of https://www.enlightenment.org/
20 years ago, there were "live cds" that could do most of what you mention, at maybe 512 MB ram.
It definitely was pretty for the day, though.
It was also rendering Display PostScript on a 25Mhz '040. One of the first machines in its day that allowed you to drag full windows, rather than frames on the desktop. High tech in action!
I mean we have larger resolution support amd scaling for hidpi, better/faster indexation, better touchpad support. Can you name anything else? Localization hasn't progressed that much, I remember already being able to select some barely spoken dialects on linux 20y ago?
Soo the feature windows 7 had? I remember running 3D desktop with compositor and fancy effects on 1GB RAM laptop on Linux...
RAM requirements for Windows as OS are ridiculus.
I know that it installs various libraries. I do not know why those libraries are dozens of megabytes each.
Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.
Nobody has any actual clue what they're doing, everyone keeps writing code for the compiler hoping for the best and the rest of the world has to buy new machines because the programmers of the last decades sucked.
That, btw, includes most of you people reading this. You're fucking welcome.
Companies will invest in what pays the bills. And hyper optimising for customers with no money isn’t it.
A top-of-the-line laptop CPU from 20 years ago likely just doesn't support addressing more than 4GB or RAM. Forcing it to work on modern resource-heavy Web pages and media is like forcing a GPU from 20 years a go to run Skyrim. It's just not adequate.
• Read the news
• Post on social media
• Make video calls
• Use instant messaging
• Create and edit word documents/presentations/spreadsheets
Today I use my computer for all of those same things... and yet they all require drastically more memory (and CPU, GPU, etc). What happened, and how does this benefit consumers? Yeah, modern web pages are resource-heavy—but to what end†?
In some cases, the requirements really did change. For example, I can now watch videos in 4K; my 2008 computer could handle 1080p, but I imagine it wouldn't have handled 4K as well. However, I suspect many users of old machines would be perfectly happy to drop down to a lower resolution.
---
† Something I find amusing in all this... people often say they're glad Flash applets died because they were slow. Nowadays, instead of Flash, we use browser apps written in Javascript. I wonder how "slow" those apps would run if you threw them on a computer from the Flash era. (This isn't to discount other problems with Flash, although I do think it has a worse reputation than it deserves.)
I think that Apple just recently stopped to sell 4 GB computers. And their phones from the last year sells with 4 GB RAM while being perfectly able to do all the things you've mentioned as well.
I used to have a 2016 dual core macbook pro with integrated graphics and 8gb of RAM or something. The machine was great when I got it, but 18 months ago it was limping along and I finally decided to get rid of it.
And it wasn't any 3rd party apps that killed the machine. Every time the machine started up, iphotoanalysisd or some random spotlight service or something would be eating all my CPU. It was always a 1st party Apple app which was making it slow. And the graphics felt laggy. Just moving windows around felt bad a lot of the time, even when I didn't have anything open. Xcode would sometimes lag the machine so much that it would drop keystrokes while I was typing. I had RAM to spare - it was a CPU problem.
In the process of wiping the machine, I booted into Recovery mode and it booted the 2016 recovery image of macos. Holy smokes - the graphics were all wicked fast again! I spent a couple minutes just moving windows around the screen in recovery mode marvelling at how fast it felt.
I wonder if reverting to an old version of macos would have fixed my problems. As far as I can tell, this was all Apple's fault. They piled up macos with so much crap that their own computers couldn't cope with the weight. I also wonder if they broke the intel graphics drivers in some point release somewhere along the way, or they started relying on GPU features that Intel's driver only had software emulation for.
Modern macos still has all that crap - the efficiency cores in my M1 laptop are constantly spinning up for some ridiculous Apple service or something. But at least now that still leaves me with 8 P-cores for my actual work. Its ridiculous.
I bet linux would have worked great on that old laptop. I wish I tried it before turfing the machine.
Compare the memory usage of:
• 2008-era Skype and iChat vs Slack, Teams, and Discord.
• 2008-era web pages (including with Flash embeds) vs modern web pages.
• Microsoft Office 2007 vs current Microsoft 365.
And it's not only or even primarily memory, but also CPU requirements and so on.
That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
> That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
Yes, but again, why? As I see it, everyone has been conditioned to this lie that computers naturally slow down over time, because that's the way it has always been relative to the speed of current software. Originally, that was for a good reason—I'm glad programs now use full-color GUIs. But now?
What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow, and we were no longer able to make computers faster than they are today? I suspect that a (slim) majority of computer users would actually benefit. Not hardcore gamers, not scientists, and certainly not software developers--some people really do need as much performance as they can get. But for the people who just need to message friends, write documents, check email, etc., the experience would be unchanged—except that their current computers would never slow down!
Years ago while I was at a startup, I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday. I wanted to write some code over the weekend. Well, I had a raspberry pi kicking around, so I fired up nodejs on that and took our project for a spin. But the program took ages to start up. I hadn't noticed the ~200ms startup time on my "real" computer, but on a r.pi that translated to over 1 second of startup time! So annoying! I ended up spending a whole morning profiling and debugging to figure out why it was so slow. Turns out we were pulling in some huge libraries and only using a fraction of the code inside. Trimming that down made the startup time ~5x faster. When I got into the office on monday, I pulled in my changes and felt the speed immediately. But I never would have fixed that if I hadn't spent that weekend developing on the raspberry pi.
Since then I've been wondering there's a way to do this systematically. Have "slow CPU tuesdays" or something, where everyone in the office turns off most of our CPU cores out of solidarity with our users. But I'm not holding my breath.
Recently it's become less possible to run the same software for 10+ years because so many things are subscription only and have unnecessary networking, which makes it necessary to patch security flaws, and then you have to accept whatever downgrade the vendor forces on you.
Older applications that you used to be able to just install run just as well as they did the day they came out on the hardware available at the time. The idea that computers "get worse" is entirely a phenomenon of the industry being full of incompetence. Even (or perhaps especially) programmers at FAANG companies are just not very good at their jobs.
Check out the argument Casey Muratori got into with the Microsoft terminal maintainers about how slow the thing was. He got the standard claims about how "oh it's so complex and Unicode is difficult and he's underestimating how hard it is", so he wrote a renderer in a few hours that was orders of magnitude faster, used way less memory, and had better Unicode support.
File system fragmentation was a very significant problem when most people still used HDDs as their primary mass storage media. SSDs are far less affected by fragmentation because of much faster random access times, but HDDs and thus performance suffered.
The Windows Registry is an arcane secret not even Microsoft fully comprehends at this point, and it can get very messy if a user installs and uninstalls lots of programs frequently. This is, of course, a problem with uninstallers not uninstalling cleanly and not a problem with Windows or the users. With so much crap moving to Chrome online-software-as-a-service outfits, users aren't (un)installing as many programs as frequently anymore, but an unkempt Windows installation can definitely slow down over time.
Software in general also just gets more and more bloated as the moons pass. More bloated software means less efficient use of hardware, meaning less performance and more user grief over time.
These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. "
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox...
This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
But isn't the primary application for these machines going to be the web browser, which is pulling in so much JS insanity that the web sites won't render well anyway?
Windows 10 (and I assume 11) has an option to "refresh" Windows in Settings.
But it doesn't really have enough RAM to run a modern web browser. A few tabs and we are swapping. That's unusably slow. A processor that's 5 or 20x slower is tolerable often. Working set not fitting in RAM is thrashing with a 1000x slowdown. And so this otherwise perfectly useful computer is garbage. Not enough RAM ends a machine's useful life before anything else does these days, in my experience.
Atom n270 netbook, go figure.
Also, run this to get a system wide adblocker:
git clone https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts
cd hosts
sed -n '/Start Steven/,$p' < hosts > hosts.append
sudo cat hosts.append >> /etc/hosts
Of course it can't run all today's bloated software, but we're talking about the operating system, here, not the applications.
https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/
DRAM density and cost isn't improving like it used to.
Also memory efficiency is about more than just total DRAM usage; bus speeds haven't kept pace with CPU speeds for a long time now. The more of the program we keep close to the CPU -- in cache -- the happier we are.
making 10% of users unreachable in order to more easily reach the other 90%. yeah, it’s a fine business strategy. though i do wish devs would be more amenable to the 10% of users who end up doing “weird” things with their app as a result. a stupid number of chat companies will release some Electron app that’s literally unusable on old hardware, and then freak out when people write 3rd party clients for it because it’s the only real option you left them.
How about all those sandboxes, protections and mitigations?
Nowadays people care about security waaay more than people did 20-30 years ago.
FreeBSD can be comfortably used on systems with 64 MiB of RAM for solving simple tasks like a small proxy server. It has always been good at this — back in the day cheap VPS often used it (and not Linux) precisely because of its small memory requirements.
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 512mb of ram you are kind of forced to use the web sans javascript and images. You are almost better off using links or w3m and tui apps for everything. Netsurf can work too if you are limiting the number of tabs open.
One a 1GB system you can definitely use a modern web browser but you definitely need the ad/trackers removal extensions and have to take good care of not opening more than 2-3 tabs or you will start swapping a lot.
I agree and I find the apologists to be completely wrong. I run a modern system: 38" screen, 2 Gbit/s fiber to the home. I'm not "stuck in the past" with a 17" screen or something.
The thing flies. It's screaming fast as it should be.
But I run a lean Debian Linux system, with a minimal window manager. It's definitely less bloated than Ubuntu and compared to Windows, well: there's no comparison possible.
Every single keystroke has an effect instantly. After reading the article about keyboard latency, I found out my keyboard was one of the lower latency one (HHKB) and yet I finetuned the Linux kernel for USB 2.0 polling of keyboard inputs to be even faster. ATM I cannot run a real-time kernel because NVidia refuses to modify a non-stock kernel (well that's what the driver says at least) but even without that: everything feels and actually is insanely fast.
I've got a dozen virtual workspace / virtual desktops and there are shortcuts assigned to each of them. I can fill every virtual virtual desktop with apps and windows and then switch like a madman on my keyboard between each of them: the system doesn't break a sweat.
I can display all the pictures on my NVME SSD in full screen and leave my finger on the arrow key and they'll move so quickly I can't follow.
Computers became very fast and monitor size / file sizes for a regular usage simply didn't grow anywhere near close as quickly as CPU performances.
Windows is a pig.
It doesn't look the same for everyone, of course. It's not about some universalizable value like minimalism. But this is a great example of one of the dimensions in which a Linux desktop can just feel really great in an almost physical way.
- most motherboards reduce the DDR clock when using > 2 sticks.
- higher capacity RAM sticks use more “ranks” (AKA “banks”), which increases latency.
as of 2 years ago, 2x single rank DDR would limit you to 64GB. but 2 years is a long time in computerland: 64GB single rank sticks sound plausible.
It's not particularly interesting or pretty, but it works well and does most if not everything that you might need, so is my choice for a daily driver. Here's the debian Wiki page on it: https://wiki.debian.org/Xfce
Apart from that, some folks also like Cinnamon, MATE, GNOME or even KDE. I think the best option is to play around in Live CDs with them and see which feel the best for your individual needs and taste. Do note that Ubuntu as a base distro might give you fewer hassles in regards to proprietary drivers, if you don't care about using only free software much.
I was already leaning towards XFCE so i will give that a try.
Also i did some reading on the proprietary drivers (nvidia, etc.) I'm going to install dual boot Debian/XFCE and Pop!_OS for the gaming.
I still can't believe that Windows has turned into such a bloatware/mess that i'm actually at a point i can't live with it anymore...
That is quite unfortunate, especially because there is some software that I think Windows does better - like MobaXTerm or 7-Zip (with its GUI), FancyZones (for window snapping) and most of the GPU control panels.
That said, as that article of mine shows, Linux on the desktop is actually way better than it used to be years ago and gaming is definitely viable, even if not all of the titles are supported. Sadly, I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, but it's still better than nothing!
I'll still probably go the dual boot route with Windows and Linux, or maybe will have a VM with GPU passthrough for specific games on Linux, although I haven't gotten it working just right, ever. Oh well, here's to a brighter future!
Zawinski’s Law - every program on windows attempts to expand until it can be your default PDF viewer. [cloud file sync, advertising display board, telemetry hoover, App Store…]
I've taught high performance data structures to dev teams. I've tried to explain how a complex problem can sometimes be solved with a simple algorithm. I've spent decades on attempting to show coworkers that applying a little comp-sci can have a profound effect in the end.
But no. Unfortunately, it always fails. The mindset is always "making it work" and problem solving is brute-forcing the problem until it works.
It takes a special kind of mindset to keep systems efficient. It is like painting a picture, but most seem to prefer doing it with a paint roller.
I'm all for dedicating time and effort towards producing performant code, but it does come at a cost - in some cases, a cost of maintainability (for an extreme example there's always https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html). In fact I'd suggest in general if you design a library of functions where obviousness/clarity/ease-of-use are your primary criteria, performance is likely to suffer. And there are undoubtedly cases where the cost of higher-grade hardware (in terms of speed and storage capacity) is vastly lower than that of more efficient software. I'd also say performance tuning quite often involves significant trade-offs that lead to much higher memory usage - caching may well be the only way to achieve significant gains at certain scales, but then as you scale up even further, the memory requirements of the caching start to become an issue in themselves. If there were a simple solution it would have been found by now.
Let's say I build a sorting algorithm that is O(N^2) complexity and works fine for small inputs (takes <1 millisecond), but it is going to be used for large data systems. Suddenly it takes hundreds of thousands of hours to sort the data.
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 pr. second with their 15-ish large server farm, which could sale down to 5 servers, or up to 50-ish before it began to wobble.
I got called in because the company had gotten a large client that needed 100k requests pr. second. They tried scaling the system to fit the need, but the whole thing got unstable and their solution was "more operations people to manage it".
I built a custom solution for the backend. Took about two months. The new system could do about 2100k requests pr. second on one server. Scalability of the new system was ~90% efficient as well, so lots of capacity for the future.
None of their developers understood computers or the science behind them. They were all educated and experienced developers, but none of that were applied to the problem. They were just assembling parts from the hardware store until something worked, and the resulting Frankenstein's Monster was put into production.
No, I'm talking about handling requests. In this particular case, requests (32 to 64 bytes) were flowing through several services (on the same computer). I replaced the processing chain with a single application to remove the overhead of serialization between processes. Requests were filtered early in the pipeline, which made a ~55% reduction in the work needed.
Requests were then batched into succinct data structures and processed via SIMD. Output used to be JSON, but I instead wrote a custom memory allocator and just memcpy the entire blob on to the wire.
Before: No pre-filtering, off-the-shelf databases (PSQL), queue system for I/O, named pipes and TCP/IP for local data transfer. Lots of concurrency issues, thread starvation and I/O bound work.
After: Agnessive pre-filtering, succinct data structures for cache coherence, no serialization overhead, SIMD processing. Can saturate a 32 core CPU with almost no overhead.
[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...
But this isn't just Windows, currently I am on Kubuntu 22.04 and it is using about 1.5GB to get to the Desktop! Yes it is very smooth and flash but it seems like a bit much to do this.
This is why I am interesting in projects like Haiku and Serenity OS, they may bring some sanity back into these things.
I guess that with careful selection of GUI components one can fit empty desktop to 60 MB.
Until you start browser anyway.
But good to know that we can still 'Hyper-mile' our OS.
When we see egregious examples like Windows, then it's arguable having constraints might be desirable. It is well-known that "limitation breeds creativity". It's certainly true outside of "tech" companies. I have witnessed it first hand. "Tech" companies are some sort of weird fantasy world where stupidity disguised as cleverness is allowed to run rampant. No more likely place for this to happen than at companies that have too much money.
edit: This remind me a some rants from Casey Muratori about VS[0] and windows terminal[1]
in my previous job rather than give people root access to their laptops we had to do things like running a docker image that ran 7zip and we piped the I/O to/from it, and I'm not kidding we all did this and it was only bearable thanks to bash aliases and the fact that we had 16GBs of RAM
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).
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?
There's no need, which is why it doesn't.
Here's the relevant quote:
> 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.
my laptop only needs to run a few things:
browser vscode steam the microsoft drawing app some office stuff sublime discord
which all update pretty regularly.
the age of the desktop app has been replaced by the age of the browser and electron based apps. i can imagine businesses who built their own set ups back in the age of the desktop app being stuck with it, but for the most part i dont think i used windows' backwards compatability anymore
* Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games.
* Discord is 32-bit.
Discord for example is literally just a chrome-less Chrome; the zoom in/out hotkeys in Chrome still work in it.
This is also not mentioning how no Electron program ever visually adheres to the desktop environment it's running in.
Discord for instance has this “currently playing game X” feature. I have zero interest in broadcasting what I’m doing at the moment to the world, but many do and have this feature enabled. Good luck implementing that in a browser-confined web app.
An example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39569062
No, it also includes:
* Voice (and text chat) overlay for games (DLL)
* Game integration via lobby & rich presence APIs
* Krisp noise cancellation (requires a DLL as well)
* (Better) screenshare (Chrome has an API for window sharing now but Discord's is a bit more robust with several backends in case one fails)
* System-wide keybinds
* Scripting support via gaming accessory apps (Logitech G HUB, HyperX, etc.)
It also (anecdotally) works faster than the web client, in my experience.
Just because the zoom controls work (which is an accessibility feature) doesn't mean it's a barebones Chrome wrapper.
basically a Proton/NixOS for Windows :)
Every time I try VS Code I just can’t commit. There’s a bit too much going on and it never feels as tight as Sublime.
I did just get a new Windows machine, so maybe I should try it on that.
I’m starting to get back into emacs recently though because I like fiddling with tools more than productivity.
Do you want steam to actually run any game? :D
I use an eeePC laptop with 2 Gb or RAM as my home computer. It's quite usable with Linux.
Not that I'm planning to install Win11 on it, but the assumption that 2GB is enough only for embedded devices is incorrect.
I think that's the point - some people have assumption that 2g is meaningless whereas others see it as HUUUGE amounts of memory. Never mind historically, let us consider what a modern phone can do with 2gb ram.
The remaining content unique to WinSXS is either for cryptographic validation, app compat, or the driver stack.
WinSXS looks like a huge folder in explorer, because explorer's size estimates do not tell you about hard links. It's not that big. I need to question somebody who thinks removing it will remove a lot of bloat.
Get the size of every “file” in the volume along with the file id of each and then subtract the size of any files with a matching file id that are in the WinSxS. Then sum the size of the remaining files that were from the WinSxS.
You can get the file id using https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/... or fsutil, etc.
You could also probably execute “fsutil hardlink list” for every “file” in WinSxS and then ignore any that list more than one result and sum the size of the remainder.
There are of course more efficient ways to do this but those are some quick hacks.
dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
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.
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.
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.
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
Twenty years ago I had already been installing Windows XP to FAT32 volumes directly to be more compatible with W9x multibooting. I didn't know anybody else doing this (some thought it couldn't be done) but every time I installed XP you can see the names of every driver as it loads during creation of the pre-installation environment. The very last two drivers are FAT32.SYS followed by NTFS.SYS. I figured Windows might have first been made functional on FAT32 but launched with the intention of total migration to NTFS for most people as seen.
In my later experimentation I found that Vista would run from a FAT32 partition but default Windows 7 would not do it very easily, simply because the WinSxS folder (pronounced win-sucks) was oversized in an insidious way.
The W7 WinSxS folder size was bigger than Vista's but it did not approach the maximum size that FAT32 can handle.
Instead it was the un-necessarily stupidly long filenames which overran the long-filename handling ability of FAT32 early when there were enough of them. Like the best engineers would never have even considered doing at the time, much less go into production.
By judiciously deleting the majority of the contents of WinSxS (but not all by any means), W7 can be run from FAT32 as well without any functional shortcomings as far as my office was concerned.
The modern approach to testing this for yourself would be to install the default W7 to a regular NTFS volume, then debloat the WinSxS folder manually, perhaps in safe mode or when booted to an alternative OS so none of the files on the W7 volume are in use at the time.
Reboot to something like the W11 USB setup media, "Troubleshoot" to go to the command prompt (instead of installing W11), then capture (back up) the debloated dormant W7 partition manually using DISM.EXE.
Then later, on a freshly formatted FAT32 drive, apply the captured W7 system, again using DISM.
Create new boot files for the newly applied W7 system using BCDBOOT.EXE.
Boot W7 while it's on FAT32 and prosper.
Works not that much faster than on an NTFS volume, but if you can reboot to Windows 9x on a multiboot system, you can search the FAT32 W7 volume blazingly faster than when the identical W7 system searches itself while on NTFS.
Now of course all of this needs to be done in legacy BIOS mode since UEFI alone is not adequate for such continued full PC performance.
I guess I could have been playing video games instead but reaching this level seemed just as rewarding anyway.
Wonder if W11 would do this.
Edit: For extra credit I already put W11 onto old BIOS PC's without any GPT, with regular MBR like it was W10.
Bypassing hardware restrictions into smaller-than-recommended NTFS volumes using DISM.
i do miss the xp's cleanup hotfix cache button though
I hope you have found yourself the MSMG toolkit for you testings
This is not strictly true, theres tonnes of reasons to use windows, for example I run thousands of gameservers.
If I can shave memory usage of the OS that translates to a lot of cost savings.
Windows XP/Vista/7 and soon: 10 being EOL does force me to upgrade.
I'm kind of in that situation and I don't thing going with Mac and the Apple ecosystem really is better than trying to use Windows 10 as long as possible on an older Thinkpad.
Everybody who's using tools like Photoshop professionally has been "shaped" to feel well in the Adobe ecosystem. I doubt that's good but that's how it is.
Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, they all feel and work similiar which helps with transitioning/switching between these tools without big issues.
Now take Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus against that. Everything looks different and probably works different, too. I need to get work done, not learn three seperate programs. Also Scribus seems to be dead, latest Dev blog entry is from 2016.
Serif is doing great work with Affinity, but Adobe is still going strong and defines the professional industry. As long as that's the case we're stuck with Windows/Macs for professional work.
The same can be said for those working on jailbreaks and the M1 Linux project, as well as all of the cracking/hacking scene. For some people, it's far more interesting and enjoyable to fight --- and possibly win --- than just "abandoning ship".
I'm pretty stuck to Windows as I need it to drive my home lab. I need to run Windows to
1. Get data from a old optical spectrometer. It was designed for optical endpointing of plasma etching. And one will have a hard time finding anything that is not running Windows in a fab (except lithography).
2. Run a 28 years old piece of software to acquire timestamps from a HP 53310A modulation domain analyzer
3. Grab frames from an old xray detector
4. Work with two NI DAQ cards. Yes, they are supposed to work on Linux, but I always get weird errors on my Ubuntu work computer while they never failed me on my Windows laptop.
5. Use Autodesk Inventor to prepare files for 3D printer/machine shop. Siemens NX used to work on Linux, but apart from that, there is not a single piece of non-toy 3D CAD software that I'm aware of support Mac or Linux.
6. LTSpice simulations and Altium Designer layouting.
Windows is the only first class citizen in many areas, software development and artistic work are two exceptions.
And so far, it seems I can still always be one step ahead of MS in the anti-consumer war, so I'm not too worried.
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.
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.
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
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.
Which one? Or I guess it's not a public release?
I have installed IoT 2021 (Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 Version 21H2) like 3 weeks ago there was nothing, no App Store, less telemetry (there is some but significantly less than on the "normal" Windows versions, but I reinstalled the App Store so maybe because of that)
*Edited the wording
It looks like this as a fresh install https://ia904606.us.archive.org/11/items/en-us_windows_10_io...
Now, of course, the struggle is to see how I can get the ISO and get it activated. I'm woefully out of the loop.
Well it's the users that are uploading but yeah Archive.org has an insane amount of stuff
I will check which ISO it was and reply back here because I'm very curious now too.
I use KMS activated non-IoT LTSC 2021 on my obsolete Surface. MS will not sell that edition to "consumers" like me, so I don't feel guilty at all for pirating it.
Unlike usual Enterprise editions, I don't think IoT Enterprise SKU will work with KMS. The only possible activation option seems to be with a PKEA key.
For a machine that never sees the internet, the IoT version runs in Deferred Activation state. So it is useful if it's for a intranet machine that never see the outside.
I just use Intel’s Clear Linux so… meh.
What about Windows 11, does something like "Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC" exist also? Would that be equally good/debloated ?
Thank you for the tip btw!
EDIT: spelling and attempted to adjust elegance
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)
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Possible by making your own custom image using dism. Everything debloat scripts are doing can be done before even making an ISO.
Why though? Microsoft is a business, Windows is a product. It works well as a product, sales is good, deployments are many. Why should they reconsider the current strategy?
They don't care. This won't bring them money. Showing you ads and tracking you will, so they'll continue doing it.
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
I wish your idea took off, but the modern "developer" (even with insane amounts of funding) 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.
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
There are applications that are extremely vulnerable to energy saving crap. Anything real-time is simply going to need to consume more power. Waiting 15.625 milliseconds completely breaks some applications.
You will take timeBeginPeriod(1) and friends from my dead, cold hands.
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.
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.
Compare that to Linux, 10gb with a full gui, and minimal bloat after the fact and it’s extremely frustrating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know what went wrong but Windows 2000 was perfect, with 7 being almost as good.
This got me thinking - I wonder what's the largest commercial entity that I'm considering good in this regard.
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.
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."
I don't know if I can consider this "bloat" removal.
That’d take well under 1MB.
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.
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%
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.
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.
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.
"Nobody uses that feature, what are you, a Linux user!?" /s
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.
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.
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.
I seriously doubt it. Do you have a source for this?
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.
I love slim systems so I'd really like to trim some fat.
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/j6...