[HN Gopher] De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM
___________________________________________________________________
De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM
Author : smusamashah
Score : 193 points
Date : 2023-02-04 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| worble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| 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.
| pkphilip wrote:
| I think there is a great market for a "debloated" windows from MS
| if sold directly from them
| wnevets wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| 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.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| Windows 11 has some nice features but I am on 10 until they fix
| some things.
| tester756 wrote:
| Which? I've only noticed lack of right click on taskbar, which
| sucks, but I don't see other things that need fix
| RamRodification wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is an Explorer Patcher tool on Github. It's doing
| pretty much great work for fixing Win11 issues!
| tester756 wrote:
| oh, I've changed that right away after W11 update with
| single reg. change and since that it's fine
| jaredhallen wrote:
| The missing option to never combine taskbar buttons is really
| bugging me.
| krembo wrote:
| 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.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Can I put the taskbar along the left side of the screen yet?
| [deleted]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| No, but I don't think they're ever going to change that
| back.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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).
| 8note wrote:
| how much backwards compatability do i neee nowadays?
|
| 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
| Dalewyn wrote:
| A lot more than you think:
|
| * Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child
| processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games.
|
| * Discord is 32-bit.
| pas wrote:
| How come people run these Electron apps separately when
| they run pretty well as tabs/windows in the browser?
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Because a long time ago Microsoft lost a lawsuit when
| they tried making the web and Windows more integrated
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Because integration into the desktop is better as an
| Electron app. Eg sound and video calls, keyboard
| shortcuts, not having to worry about finding your
| Discord/Slack/whatever tab
| zamadatix wrote:
| They may update regularly but that doesn't mean they only use
| modern features. E.g. even just Steam itself (not just games
| in it) is largely still 32 bit on Windows requiring gigabytes
| of 32 bit compatibility files using interfaces going back
| decades even though Windows 11 itself doesn't have a 32 bit
| version anymore.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| What's the use case for needing to run steam but not
| individual games? Are you using desktop sharing with an ec2
| instance or something?
| pas wrote:
| i'd be happy to hunt DLLs for games instead of installing
| every damned VCredist and directx package globally.
|
| basically a Proton/NixOS for Windows :)
| bombolo wrote:
| > steam
|
| Do you want steam to actually run any game? :D
| [deleted]
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Isn't it interesting that both you and I frequently use
| Sublime and VS Code? Why can't VS Code kill off Sublime? It's
| interesting to me where a text editor like Sublime can't be a
| preferable IDE, but an IDE also isn't a preferable text
| editor?
| speg wrote:
| Sublime is, well, Sublime.
|
| 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.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| When you are using Sublime, do you have the ability to
| right click somewhere and "go to definition" in a big
| code base?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Um. Where else do you need it to run in 2GB but embedded? I
| think the article is informative, fair and correct.
| demetrius wrote:
| > Where else do you need it to run in 2GB but embedded?
|
| 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.
| djur wrote:
| "De-bloated" implies that the stuff removed is "bloat", i.e.
| worthless. I wouldn't assume that a "de-bloated" install was
| any less suitable for general purpose computing tasks.
| Semaphor wrote:
| In their defense, they also don't recommend running it on
| anything that can actually run normal Win 11.
| causality0 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The article talks about memory savings and storage
| savings. Removing WinSXS is a storage savings play, not a
| memory savings play.
|
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Caching frequently used apps for snappiness.
| mordae wrote:
| 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.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| 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.
| pancrufty wrote:
| 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
| anthk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tlamponi wrote:
| 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.
| jug wrote:
| 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...
| abraxas wrote:
| 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.
| kristianp wrote:
| I was recently boggling at how a running small python script
| could take up 30+ MB of RAM. The data it processed was probably
| < 100kb in total.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The standards were also a lot lower back then. Modern-day users
| expect high resolution and color depth for their screens,
| seamless hardware support no matter what they plug into the
| machine, i18n with incredibly complex text rendering rather
| than a fixed size 80x25 text mode with 256 selectable
| characters, etc. These things take some overhead. We can
| improve on existing systems (there's no real reason for web
| browsers to be as complex as they are, a lot of it is pure
| bells and whistles) but some of that complexity will be there.
| darknavi wrote:
| And they also expect their programs from 20 years ago still
| run.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous
| resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for
| easier development allowing for more features, support for
| large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, browsers are
| almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble
| an OS unto themselves, email clients have stayed mostly the
| same at least except for the part that they also ship a browser
| and few of us even use 'em anymore! Some of those features
| combine exponentially in complexity and hardware requirements,
| and some optimizations will trade memory for speed.
|
| Not going to defend particular implementations, but
| requirements? Those have definitely grown more than we give
| them credit.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Resolutions and HDR are one area where I think the extra RAM
| load and increasing application sizes make complete sense.
| However, my monitors run at 1080p, don't do HDR, and my video
| files are rncoded at a standard colour depth. Despite all
| this, the standalone RAM usage has increased over the years.
|
| Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web
| applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility
| 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.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| SSD access times are as much as 100,000 ns memory 50 ms SSD
| do not negate the virtue of cache.
| agumonkey wrote:
| more features but not sure features i want or need, nor in
| fun interactions
|
| that said 2GB is acceptable considering the state of
| everything
|
| not saying i wouldn't like to have QNX class back
| grishka wrote:
| > HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions
|
| That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly.
|
| > 3D everything
|
| That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and
| ran on 1 GB of RAM.
|
| > accessibility
|
| Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional
| installable component for those who do.
|
| > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more
| features
|
| That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed
| for 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Prodigy had vector based graphics in a terminal back in the
| 1980's. Granted, that targeted EGA and 2400 baud modems,
| but I wonder how well it would work on modern hardware if
| you just gave it a 4k, 24bit frame buffer, and fixed up the
| inevitable integer overflows.
| djur wrote:
| > Not everyone needs [accessibility], so it should be an
| additional installable component for those who do.
|
| The UI has to be designed from the ground up to support
| accessibility.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I'd also like to add that accessibility is not a binary
| that's either on or off. Parent comment might be thinking
| of features for people with high disability ratings, but
| eventually everyone has some level of disability. Some
| even start of life with one: color blindness, vision
| impairment. Most people have progressive near vision loss
| (presbyopia) as they age.
|
| Also, disability may not be permanent. I recently
| 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.
| abraxas wrote:
| Accessibility support was in Windows 95 as far as I
| remember.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Are you seriously suggesting that accessibility support
| in modern OSes is _less_ complex than in Windows 95?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm suggesting the modern accessibility support doesn't
| need more memory than the entirety of windows 95. So 4MB
| extra, or let's say 10x that to be generous.
| hulitu wrote:
| Yes. At least in Windows 10 is a disaster. Without high
| contrast, which looks terrible, it draws gray colors on
| light background making it difficult to read.
| anthk wrote:
| Microsoft should copy the Zukitre theme from GTK2/3 as
| the inspiration. It's flat yet it has some contrast.
| grishka wrote:
| You mean the new .net touch-sized stuff? How many times
| was it designed "from the ground up"? Metro, UWP, WinUI
| are the incarnations I remember, and I haven't been using
| Windows for more than 10 years. And even in the latest
| Windows 11, there's still plenty of old win32 stuff that
| they probably would never get rid of because getting rid
| of it is at odds with backwards compatibility.
|
| And no, the UI doesn't need to be designed from the
| ground up to support accessibility. Adding labels to icon
| buttons and exposing them to screen readers isn't rocket
| science. It can be done in any existing UI toolkit.
| dagmx wrote:
| Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen
| reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don't
| use directly, it's a common thread between all your
| comments, and it's a disservice to both the points you're
| trying to make and the people who actually use those
| things .
|
| Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability,
| audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering
| modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive
| devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper
| into the system than just labels for a screen reader.
|
| If you stopped to just think about the vast number of
| disabilities out there, you'd realize how untrue your
| statement is.
| grishka wrote:
| My point is that accessibility being _a thing_ shouldn 't
| ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no
| need to _visually redesign_ anything to introduce
| accessibility. Apps don 't need to be made aware whether
| some control has focus because the user has pressed the
| tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen
| reader, or because of some other assistive technology.
| Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've
| been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 -- and that
| _is_ exposed to apps.
|
| Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be
| built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to
| be designed from the ground up to support them.
| dagmx wrote:
| Your point about "apps don't need to be made aware" is
| precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system
| UI framework.
|
| Accessibility is also not something that is just a
| binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger
| text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that
| overrides the apps rendering. There's just so many levels
| of nuance here. It's not just "apps can configure a
| palette", it's that they need to work across the system
|
| If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple
| developer videos on accessibility to see why it's not
| just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great
| work for accessibility too , they just don't have much
| content up to delve into it.
|
| As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it
| doesn't, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless.
| Apple for example didn't redo their UI for accessibility,
| however Microsoft take a more "we won't touch existing
| stuff in case we break it" approach to their core libs.
|
| Also , again, I'd point out that you're purposefully
| trying to trivialize something you don't use.
| grishka wrote:
| > It's not just "apps can configure a palette", it's that
| they need to work across the system
|
| There is a system-provided color palette. I don't know
| where this UI is in modern Windows, but in versions where
| you could enable the "classic" theme, you could still
| configure these colors. They are, of course, exposed to
| apps, and apps are expected to use them to draw their
| controls. That, as well as theme elements since XP.
|
| > Microsoft take a more "we won't touch existing stuff in
| case we break it" approach to their core libs.
|
| Making sure you don't break existing functionality is
| called regression testing. I'm sure Microsoft already
| does a lot of it for each release.
|
| And actually it's not quite that. The transition from 9x
| to NT involved _swapping an entire kernel from underneath
| apps_. Most apps didn 't notice it. In fact, the
| backwards compatibility is maintained so well that I can
| run apps from the 90s -- built for, and only tested on,
| the old DOS-based Windows versions -- on my modern ARM
| Mac, in a VM, through an x86 -> ARM translation layer.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom
| ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate
| rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for
| assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes
| far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen
| reader.
|
| I wonder where the current status quo lies in regards to
| both desktop computing and web applications/sites. Which
| OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or
| worst, how do they compare? How have they evolved over
| time? Which web frameworks/libraries give one the best
| starting point to iterate upon, say, component libraries
| and how well they integrate with something like
| React/Angular/Vue?
|
| Sadly I'm not knowledgeable enough at the moment to
| answer all of those in detail myself, but there are at
| least some tools for web development. For
| example, this seems to have helpful output:
| https://accessibilitytest.org There was also this
| one, albeit a bit more limited:
| https://www.accessibilitychecker.org I also found
| this, but it seemed straight up broken because it
| couldn't reach my site: https://wave.webaim.org/
| From what I can tell, there are many tools like this:
| https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/
|
| And yet, while we talk about accessibility occasionally,
| we don't talk about how good of a starting point certain
| component frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap vs
| PrimeFaces/PrimeNG/PrimeVue, Ant Design, ...) provide us
| with, or how easy it is to setup build toolchains for
| automated testing and reporting of warnings.
|
| As for OS related things, I guess seeing how well Qt, GTK
| and other solutions support the OS functionality and what
| that functionality even is is probably a whole topic in
| of itself.
| extra88 wrote:
| > it seemed straight up broken because it couldn't reach
| my site: https://wave.webaim.org/
|
| It worked for me, it found lots of color contrast
| problems (white-on-light purple has low contrast).
| https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://kronis.dev/
|
| WAVE is also available as a browser extension.
|
| Accessibility checkers can be helpful, particularly for
| catching basic errors before they ship. The large
| majority of accessibility problems a site can have cannot
| be identified by software, humans need to find them.
|
| Current Bootstrap is not bad if you read and follow all
| of their advice. I'm not claiming there are no problems
| lurking amongst their offerings.
|
| If you search for "name-of-thing accessibility" and don't
| find extensive details about accessibility in the thing's
| own documentation, it probably does a poor job. A
| framework can't prevent developers from making mistakes.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Thanks for those links. I found a few minor items in my
| website that I was able to easily address.
| dagmx wrote:
| > Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the
| best or worst, how do they compare?
|
| Hands down macOS/iOS are the leaders here with
| Cocoa/SwiftUI/UIKit etc (ultimately basically the same).
| The OS also has many hooks to allow third party
| frameworks to tie in to the accessibility.
|
| Windows is second in my opinion. Microsoft does some good
| work here but it's not as extensive in terms of
| integrations and pervasiveness due to how varied their
| ecosystem is now. They do however do excellent work on
| the gaming side with their accessibility controllers.
|
| In terms of UI frameworks, Qt is decent but not great .
| Electron actually does well here because it can piggy
| back off the work done for web browsers. Stuff like Imgui
| etc rank at the bottom because they don't expose the tree
| to the OS in a meaningful way.
|
| I can't speak to web frameworks. In theory it shouldn't
| matter as long as the components are good. Many node
| frameworks try and install a11y as a package to encourage
| better accessibility.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Windows, Electron
|
| Gray on gray, Teams. Accessible like a hammer: everything
| looks like nails.
| dagmx wrote:
| Irrelevant. You can make bad apps in any framework and
| bad accessibility choices as well. That's not a
| reflection of the framework or tool itself
| JoBrad wrote:
| I switched from windows to macOS, which I've been using
| as my daily driver for the last year or so. Using the
| touchpad (or maybe the Magic Mouse) is basically a
| requirement to use "vanilla" macOS. Yes, you can install
| additional programs to help with window management, etc.,
| but in my experience macOS is absolutely horrible when it
| comes to accessibility, from this standpoint. Maybe it's
| better for colors, TTS, etc.?
| extra88 wrote:
| Did you enable Full Keyboard Access and learn how to use
| it?
| dagmx wrote:
| I'm not sure what walls you might have been hitting but
| macOS is completely useable with speech direction. I had
| to quite recently add better accessibility support to an
| app I worked on and I was basically navigating the entire
| system with voice control and keyboard hotkeys.
|
| Voice control in particular is really handy with the
| number and grid overlays for providing commands.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "No one asked for this. My personal opinion"
|
| _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.
| [deleted]
| blacklion wrote:
| It liberated you as developer. As developer, I could
| understand. As user I hate you. You never provide me as
| user with native experience via web UI. You use custom
| controls, which broke conventions of native controls a
| little bit there and here. You can not use full power of
| OS (YouTube or Spotify player doesn't pause itself when
| workstation is locked, my native player of choice does).
| You eat my resources. You cannot make your application
| consistent with application from other vendor, so I need
| to remember different pattern for different apps. Your
| typical browser app doesn't have ANY features for power
| users, like shortcuts for all commands and useful
| keyboard controls (not to mention full customization of
| these controls, toolbars, etc). Damn you and your
| laziness!
|
| 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 :-(
| grishka wrote:
| > liberated us from writing specialized desktop apps for
| various OSes
|
| I use macOS and I very much dislike anything built with
| cross-platform GUI toolkits, and especially the web
| stack. And it's always painfully obvious when something
| is not native. It doesn't behave like the rest of the
| system. It's _not mac-like_. It draws its own buttons
| from scratch and does its own event handling on them
| instead of using NSButton. I don 't 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.
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| Hold up. It's been ~14 years since Apple shipped machines
| with 2GB of memory as base their base model.
|
| 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
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against
| high-memory bloat in computing today.
|
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| Screen reader support by itself doesn't gobble memory.
| Android has had it for ages, and still runs on devices
| with less than 1 GB RAM (Android Wear watches).
|
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't like the direction GUIs have gone either, and
| think the JavaScript-ization of everything has been
| pretty dumb. But it seems that bloat is doing well in the
| market.
|
| Users might not care about developer experience, but
| everything is a trade off: developer time is a cost, the
| cost of producing software is an input into how much it
| needs to cost. Users seem to want features delivered
| quickly, without much regard to implementation quality.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I want touchscreen support on Windows. But guess what?
| Multitouch worked in Windows 7. If Windows still supported
| theming basic controls then Microsoft could enable touch
| screen support in most applications by setting a theme,
| similar to how they enhance contrast if you enable that
| feature.
|
| 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.
| Jochim wrote:
| > as resources become cheaper, developers become lazier.
|
| 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| > That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly.
|
| 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.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I've got 8GB of RAM on my GPU.
|
| Could we stop shuffling it out? Do more of the work
| there, directly?
| SSLy wrote:
| sure https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/sys...
| dagmx wrote:
| Direct storage doesn't address the majority of these
| concerns though. It only means the CPU doesn't need to
| load data first to shuffle it over, but it doesn't help
| if the CPU does need to access said data or schedule it.
|
| It's largely applicable mainly to games where resource
| access is known ahead of time.
| dagmx wrote:
| Unintuitively, your two questions are somewhat at odds
| with each other.
|
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| >That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one
| and ran on 1 GB of RAM.
|
| Compiz ran fine with a 128MB GPU and 512MB of RAM.
| grishka wrote:
| Actually, IIRC the only requirement for DWM to work was a
| GPU that supports shaders, because that's what makes the
| window border translucency/blur effect possible.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Compatible driver, actually. There were at least DWM 1.0
| (Vista) and DWM 1.2 (Win7), but Intel never provided a
| compatible driver for... 915? Series, so you could't
| enable composition on them, despite hardware were capable
| enough.
| yobbo wrote:
| > HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything
|
| 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.
| mixedCase wrote:
| I ran e16 and then e17 as my main desktop back in the day
| for a good while. I'm sorry but what we had back then was
| nowhere even near what I'm talking about.
|
| It definitely was pretty for the day, though.
| anthk wrote:
| Then, OSX. A G4 with 512MB of RAM could perfectly do that
| at 1280x800.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more
| features
|
| 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.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Further abstractions on top of windows have though:
| websites, electron apps, etc.
| znpy wrote:
| to be honest i'd give up most of today's niceties to get a
| snappier computer experience.
|
| 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.
| mixedCase wrote:
| It is still possible to have a snappy computer experience.
| Go Linux, use a very configurable distro (Arch, Gentoo,
| NixOS), choose a lightweight DE and app ecosystem and it
| will get you there for the most part.
|
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Imagine the first person to realize that you can write bloated
| software faster than highly-optimized software. Competitive
| advantage over his peers.
| ShaneMcGowan wrote:
| We don't need to worry about memory efficiency until we stop
| getting gains via hardware improvements. For now developers can
| just slap a web app into some chromium based wrapper, make sure
| their code doesn't have any n^2 in it and you're good to go.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| You're part of the reason why we're stuck in the mess most
| people, actual idiots, don't even acknowledge as a mess.
| retrac wrote:
| I have a netbook from around 2010. It has 2 GB of RAM and a
| single core Atom processor. It boots to a full Linux GUI
| desktop in a minute or so. It can handle CAD software, my
| editor, and my usual toolchain, if a bit slowly. It even
| handles HD video and the battery still holds a 6 hr charge.
|
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Enable ZRAM. I run luakit with just 1GB of RAM and a
| compressed GB of ZRAM.
|
| 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
|
| EDIT: wrong URL
| est31 wrote:
| That's fine for those desktop users which don't care about
| spinning fans, but many users are on laptops, and care about
| battery life. An inefficiently coded app might keep the CPU
| in high levels even if it's absolutely not required for the
| app because it is just a chat app or such.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Tell that to the person on a fixed income who has to invest
| in an expensive new machine because their 2015 laptop (which
| still has a whopping 4 GB of memory and a CPU that would have
| been top-of-the-line twenty years ago) has become unusably
| slow.
|
| Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental
| issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.
| DrewRWx wrote:
| It is depressing that I had this same argument in college a
| decade ago and people are still so cavalier about not
| optimizing their code.
| josefx wrote:
| To be fair, if you forced programmers to write efficient
| code you would just make everything more expensive and
| flood the market for unskilled labor with university
| graduates that can't find their own ass.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| Actually no. If programmers actually learned how to
| properly program the machines, we'd not be in the mess we
| are in right now. Abstraction is the cancer that got us
| to where we are.
|
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If it really did come down to that, I would _still_
| rather people had to pay more for software and less for
| hardware, because software has a comparatively minuscule
| environmental impact.
| nine_k wrote:
| No need to invest into an _expensive_ new machine; a device
| from 5 years ago, with some more added RAM, would already
| be pretty adequate. Typing this from a Thinkpad T470 which
| was introduced in 2017, which is my main workhorse machine.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 20 years ago is pushing it a bit. But 12 years ago, in
| 2008, I used a computer with 4GB of RAM in order to:
|
| * 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.)
| arbitrage wrote:
| Expecting your 8+ year old laptop to run as well as it did
| when it was new is completely unreasonable.
|
| That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history
| of computing.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why? Are the types of things I want that laptop to do
| different today than they were 8 years ago? Sure, apps
| and websites are heavier, but I'd posit the things most
| people _do_ on their computers haven 't changed in a
| decade at least.
|
| > That has never been a reasonable expectation in the
| history of computing.
|
| Yes, but again, why? As I see it, everyone has been
| conditioned to this _lie_ that computers naturally slow
| down over time, because that 's the way it has always
| been relative to the speed of current software.
| Originally, that was for a good reason--I'm glad programs
| now use full-color GUIs. But now?
|
| What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow,
| and we were no longer able to make computers faster than
| they are today? I suspect that a (slim) majority of
| computer users would actually _benefit_. Not hardcore
| gamers, not scientists, and certainly not software
| developers--some people really do need as much
| performance as they can get. But for the people who just
| need to message friends, write documents, check email,
| etc., the experience would be unchanged--except that
| their current computers would _never_ slow down!
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I've never expected my computer to run worse over time.
| There's no real mechanism for that to even happen; it
| works fine until it fails completely.
|
| 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.
| tester756 wrote:
| > has not grown in complexity by four orders of magnitude in 20
| years.
|
| How about all those sandboxes, protections and mitigations?
|
| Nowadays people care about security waaay more than people did
| 20-30 years ago.
| gbin wrote:
| Unfortunately more like nagging features, crapware, etc...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Indeed. When I de-bloated Windows NT workstation, I could
| reliably get it down to fourteen megabytes of RAM.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| api wrote:
| My favorite is Geos for the Commodore 64:
|
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| To me the most impressive recent example is a video editor
| developed for Haiku OS [0]. It fits on a 1.44MB floppy disk.
|
| [0] https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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
|
| [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_manual
| s/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.
| nine_k wrote:
| Sure, Commodore could do all that!
|
| 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.
| api wrote:
| That doesn't account for the sheer monstrosity of modern
| software. You don't need gigabytes of RAM for those
| things.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping.
|
| 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...]
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Let's pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM
| it takes to run it even after this exercise.
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The low-end requirements for Debian GNU/Linux (assuming a
| graphical install and an up-to-date version) are not _that_
| low. They 're higher than the low-end for Windows XP when it
| first came out, and probably close to the official
| requirements for "Vista-capable" machines. So yes, it's a
| very efficient system by modern standards but it does come
| with some very real overhead nevertheless.
| anthk wrote:
| VIsta capable wasn't that capable. It required 1GB of RAM
| to run well. Debian with ZRAM and light DE could run with
| 512MB of RAM and Seamonkey + UBlock Origin with patience.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I remember taking Windows XP to below 100 MB of RAM usage.
| bArray wrote:
| I remember needing to get Windows XP under 64MB of RAM so
| that I could run some photo editing software. XP was
| relatively feature complete, I don't think Windows currently
| ships with 32x the features of XP (64MB vs 2048MB minimum).
|
| 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.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Seamonkey is still around and works nicely on low spec
| machines (not sure about 128Mb though) as a step up from
| NetSurf. You get a graphical email client and news/gopher
| built in. Also a rudimentary Web page editor. Printing a
| Web page to pdf is a rough and ready way of getting rich
| text onto paper. The 'legacy' version of the noscript plug-
| in will allow selective use of javascript (saves battery
| and helps with security which might be an issue).
|
| [1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
|
| [2] https://noscript.net/getit/ [scroll down to bottom,
| note there is no support]
| anthk wrote:
| More than NoScript, get Ublock Origin Legacy:
|
| 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://68k.news
|
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Then that's where it started to double. I was running Windows
| NT 3.51 running Visual C++ on 32MB.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Well, other operating systems are still relatively decent at
| this. My main Linux install eats ~250 MiB of RAM after startup,
| and I've spent exactly zero amount of time on that, so it can
| be trimmed down further. That's on a system with 32 GiB of RAM
| -- if you have less RAM, it will eat even less since page
| tables and various kernel buffers will be smaller.
|
| FreeBSD can be comfortably used on systems with 64 MiB of RAM
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| OpenWRT Linux with Musl ran fine under 48MB of RAM, 7-8MB
| running. Modern GNU/Linux, I mean.
| [deleted]
| pedro2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm guessing there is no ARM/Pi version for this?..
| hedora wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| maps work perfectly fine on my no gapps phone, so does
| Whatsapp or signal
| nirav72 wrote:
| This might come in handy as a VM.
| vmoore wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| temporallobe wrote:
| 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!
| grumpywndw_user wrote:
| 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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
| RamRodification wrote:
| 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.
| squarefoot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I have another one to add: does Windows Update work? I'd like
| to keep receiving security patches
| squarefoot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you for the help. That's too bad
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Telemetry isn't malware.
| haunter wrote:
| 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
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| haunter wrote:
| >LTSC is no longer debloated. The latest version
|
| 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...
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| This seems magically good.
|
| 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.
| haunter wrote:
| As pretty much with a lot of things nowadays Archive.org
| is your friend https://archive.org/details/en-
| us_windows_10_iot_enterprise_...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Thank you! I'm also a little shocked, I had no idea
| Archive.org was doing this. I'm starting to get the
| impression that there's quite a lot going on under the
| hood at archive.org, just reams of stuff I've never
| noticed ...
| haunter wrote:
| >I had no idea Archive.org was doing this
|
| Well it's the users that are uploading but yeah
| Archive.org has an insane amount of stuff
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| What is the difference between IoT and normal LTSC?
| haunter wrote:
| Here is a handy reddit post when I was researching the same h
| ttps://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 wrote:
| wait, can I use this as a daily driver on a laptop?
| haunter wrote:
| I use it to play games! It's totally perfect as a daily
| driver
| nerdjon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I used this one https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
| and yeah I had to heavily customize it and then I did need to
| re-enable something afterwords which I found on the github.
|
| Basically what I did was I started with the default and then
| unchecked (or checked? I don't remember what the UI called
| for now) anything related to Xbox and the Store and I didnt
| have any issues.
|
| I also did a comparison before and after and it was actually
| a pretty decent improvement. About a 10fps improvement over
| SteamOS and a Normal Windows 10.
|
| For me the biggest incentive was being able to play xbox game
| pass games and not needing to worry about any compatibility
| issues with Proton which is why I went down that route.
|
| But yeah your second part is very true. I feel, the impact is
| minimal if you are on a traditional PC. But on something with
| such limited resources like a Steam Deck, the difference can
| be going from 40 fps to mid 50's and a few more minutes of
| battery life.
|
| But it isn't something I would recommend most people do. More
| just kinda pointing out that with the effort I think
| Microsoft could make a lean Windows really just by taking a
| look at what is actually necessary to be run for specific
| tasks.
| college_physics wrote:
| 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
| 72deluxe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| No, there should not. Otherwise every single app shop on earth
| is going to he paying it.
| nine_k wrote:
| > 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
| bob1029 wrote:
| No there should not. Laggy bullshit software is already bad
| enough and developing low latency user experiences is only
| getting harder.
|
| 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.
| bsuvc wrote:
| How does this compare to a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu?
| camel-cdr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| 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%
| asicsp wrote:
| Just checked `free` on my Ubuntu desktop: 913MB for a browser
| with 3 tabs.
| [deleted]
| lambdaxymox wrote:
| 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.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| 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!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-04 23:02 UTC)