Comment by joe_mamba
8 hours ago
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users.
You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.
Something similar, or indeed, exactly the same:
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/leak...
Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.
Maybe, could also be that for a 9 figure government contract they'll provide a custom LTSC branch just for you with only the features you want.
I geniunely wonder if Windows G's start menu also use React and if the start menu, right click or Windows Search still sucks in Windows G or not :)
React Native, halfway between Web and native.
Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.
I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.
If anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even.
This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on par with Linux (i.e. almost nothing from the cheap vendors).
>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD.
>but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11
They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important.
So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.
Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.
What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?
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Microsoft should just open source Windows at this point.
Never heard of Windows G .. that sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads :-)
I've been starting with Tiny11 and then running the debloat scripts against it. Reduces the memory footprint to about 2GB and have found zero compatibility problems with doing this. You just have to use curl or something to download a browser because you won't even have Edge.
> Windows G .. sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads
I'm running 11 IoT Ent LTSC on a some T420; it runs pretty okay.