Pavan Davuluri says the rising cost of memory is why Windows 11 will use less RAM, with work on the memory manager, WinUI 3 and WebView2.
For the whole system, or just the spyware part?
Yes.
All part of the goal of turning personal computing into cable TV by making everything web app SASS.
Great now remove the motherfucking tracking ID
Which one? Or, like, all of them? Naaaah.
Linux: You guys have tracking IDs?
I recently had to configure an older Thinkpad X1 Carbon G8 for my little brother. It’s only got 8GB of RAM unfortunately and he needs Windows.
So I installed Windows 11 IoT LTSC like I usually do, installed all necessary drivers and manually deactivated services that don’t need to run. It still uses 3GB of RAM while idling.
My 2-year-old daily driver Manjaro install uses half of that, and that’s on a system with 32GB RAM where Windows would almost certainly use more just because there’s more
Win 10 LTSC, Tiny10 or Tiny11 no good for your brother’s use case? I haven’t kept up with the Tiny cooks but IIRC Tiny 10 used a comically small amount of ram.
I haven’t looked at Tiny10/11 in a long while actually. I remember it not really working that well, although maybe it still was in beta back then.
10 is EOL, so I wouldn’t use it anymore tbh
10 still receives free updates, LTSC will have support for some time after and IOT I think until 2030.
But Debian will work in a fucking toaster for the next forever, so there’s that.
Or maybe create GUIs without a webbrowser underneath again? Or are your students not capable of anything but web tech?
Some devs in the big corpos got spoiled with so much memory, with feature creep they managed to bloat up once reliable programs.
In 1994 and when I began compsci, I remember how memory and bandwidth conservation was then taken so seriously, where performance was a high consideration over eyecandy. That I once got hold of Creating Killer Websites (yeah, that book), which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup. Videogames were then equally small, they were mostly sprite-based and were easily fit into a CDROM, as other games had basic vector graphics and low-resolution texturing.
It’s wild reading about the old game systems, like Atari, and all the tricks and techniques they used to cram data and code into small amounts of memory.
Yeah any time you hear devs saying “developer productivity “ you can associate the software they produce with higher ram usage, larger footprint, slower and doesn’t work unless your internet is fast.
which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup
I’m looking at you, lemmy sidebar header images that don’t get scaled down after uploading and are often > 5 Mb.
Ah, my mistake, i missread. It “will” use less memory (like, maybe one day).
Was it because Win11 had a bunch of slopcoded Copilot bs? Inquiring minds want to know.
dude, windows uses paging even if it has a free bank of memory to use…i’ve seen it with my own eyes…it’s a complete trash OS…swaps like nobody’s business
If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.
Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.
The effect is that OEMs are bringing 8GB laptops back, and hopefully, Windows 11 won’t choke on it.
8GB of RAM: the gift that keeps on giving. In 2005, you were basically running a supercomputer. By 2015, you were… still doing fine, honestly. Fast forward to 2025 and your machine is wheezing like it just climbed five flights of stairs while Chrome is open. But wait—2026 rolls around and suddenly 8GB is back to being acceptable again because everyone finally realized Electron apps were a mistake and went back to native development. Just kidding, we’re all doomed. Your IDE alone needs 12GB now.
https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker
This was in my feed today. 23 years old. Nothing improved. But sure, windows will use less ram 😹
As AI, cloud-native development, containers, and open-source ecosystems continue to converge on Linux
When the VP Windows Platform is telling things like that, it’s time to let it die already…
[ ] Source
Sure, I’m going to start running my containers using WSL. Who knows what kind of wonderful surprises are in store in the network layer? How the environment parameter passing will be somewhat more brittle with funky new ways to break because of new characters you have to escape? I can’t wait to troubleshoot all of that, and spend countless hours on MS forums and meet fellow colleagues with similar issues. What fun.
You forgot the bot reply on the ms forum closing the issue 4 years ago because “there was no interest” in the conversation. Closed = no need to fix surely.
My Windows 2000 machine had 512MB of RAM. With it I could browse the web, run full-featured word processors, scan images, edit images, play 3D games, edit / compile / debug C and C++ programs, and so on.
If memory serves, my office machine about that time only had 128MB of RAM. It was slower, but it could do just about all of that stuff, too.
I’m not sure there are any broad categories of tasks I use computers for today that I wasn’t already using my Windows 2000 machine for back in 2001 or so.
It’s hard to fathom where all the RAM in modern systems goes. A million somethings is a lot. A million bytes is a huge amount of information. War And Peace is under four million characters.
I literally just now disabled hiberfil.sys on Windows (it’s basically useless tbh) and reclaimed 30 fucking GB of space.
powercfg /h off
30GB.
WTAF.
Hibernation was useful when people shut down their machines (like, actually shut down, not sleep) and getting any process started was a slow ordeal. Nowadays you don’t really turn your computer off anyway. Windows doesn’t by default, at least. Newer laptops often don’t even support real sleep, you’re expected to keep them running 24/7.
Bet. Some other group will just eat it up
Haven’t we seen this movie from Microsoft before ?
Let’s put out some press releases and then do nothing. It will be old news soon and no one will notice
