10 mo. ago • 91%

Microsoft's current OS has been shrunk to a ridiculous 100MB in size, but only by getting rid of windows from Windows

www.pcgamer.com Microsoft's current OS has been shrunk to a ridiculous 100MB in size, but only by getting rid of windows from Windows

It's like a beautiful revival of 1980s computing in all its DOS glory.

28 comments

deletes Windows iso

I’ve shrunk Windows to 0MB! It’s more lightweight than Linux (maybe)!

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- Still same functionality as before
  
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  not quite, now you have to manually delete your bootloader instead of windows doing it for you
  
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- Installed Arch (btw), motherboard grew a new NAND SSD.
  
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What's the point of this? The article managed to miss that somehow

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- I guess for containerization?
  
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- Windows Server is basically useless in the modern era of containers and cloud computing. If they’re ever going to compete in that space long term, they need a minimal viable version of Windows that can scale however customers want.
  
  They also have embedded Windows, which is the type of thing that runs on ATMs or IoT devices. Not sure why anyone would use it instead of Linux but I guess the license fees are worth having someone to call (or blame) for some companies.
  
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  Windows server is still wildly used for ADDS.
  
  I don't think windows server is that threatened by containers.
  
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  I'm not sure I follow that server is useless. In the SMB and Enterprise, it's still required for a domain/exchange, user management, software distribution, etc.
  
  Yea, it can be virtualized, and is, even in SMB. It's pretty standard to run a VMware host even there - it's a better cost against utilization. More importantly, virtualized server provides better uptime, better load balancing/management, a much better backup process, and brings a bit of disaster recovery capability to the SMB space.
  
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- In the context of the people who did it, I think it's just a "bit of fun"; a hobbyist hacking project to see how far you can take something.
  
  But that said, it is absolutely insane how much disk space Windows needs. Windows Server 2022, with its most minimal "core" installation option, still has a minimum requirement of a baffling 32GB of hard disk space. By comparison, Ubuntu Server's published minimum requirement is for only 2.5GB (with more specialist minimalist distros like Alpine coming in at well under 1GB).
  
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  The ubuntu:24.04 Docker image is only 77.30 MiB.
  
  alpine:3.19.0 is 7.38 MiB.
  
  Of course those sizes are without a kernel. Typical everything-included distro kernels are generally a few hundred MiB as they include drivers for everything that might be needed, but a custom build for known hardware can reduce that to just a few MiB.
  
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- Why not?
  
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- I think this could be useful as a server OS. If you wanted to run 1 specific piece of software as efficiently as possible, you could start with this DOS system and add in only what you need.
  
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So,.. DOS.

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- That’s a Win..
  
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  … small klap.
  
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That’s always one thing I hated about Windows Server Core. It still uses the graphical subsystem but only offered you a command prompt…. Which was in a window. I would have loved to see them go true text mode only, bit it seemed parts of the graphics subsystem was embedded in the kernel so they just went with it.

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Baldurs gate 3 has gone from from 140gb to 200mb by changing it to a text based adventure.

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- A Dark Place is great tho
  
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Still a far cry from the days when the whole thing fit on a handful of floppies.

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- To be fair, this fits pretty much any device produced today, which is better than realising you are missing disk 3 to install it
  
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  Yeah, there are no guarantees there, assuming you can even find a working floppy drive. (I actually own a full set of DOS 6.22 + Win 3.1 install floppies, and a full set of 16-bit MS Office install floppies as well, but whether any of them are still readable is anyone's guess. If I ever tried to use them again, I'd probably find out that the next-to-last Office floppy had died of spontaneous degaussing at some point in the past twenty years, after I'd already gone through the remaining 40+ disks.)
  
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With Microsoft killing Windows 10 and windows itself , a new era of pirate forks will come.

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Oh, good, they reinvented DOS.

I wonder if Microsoft put a team of a couple hundred people on it for a few years how small they could get the current OS. Given, obviously, it's a fool's errand, but how much of the size of the current OS is just because disc and ram are cheaper now?

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Reverse Xzibit Pimp my Ride meme

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This iso and blackbox window manager and done, debloated windows

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Permanently Deleted

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