> This was more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable.
Virtually nothing can run due to critical missing files such as common dialog boxes and common controls.
Without new hardware, old hardware would eventually die.
When that old hardware dies, it would likely be replaced with a similar design rather than more evolved hardware. This would mean we’d have to develop for longevity. Developing for longevity, could mean that software would flourish. Software flourishing could include malware and inefficient software sold to fight malware. Therefore, it is more secure and efficient to continually evolve operating systems to require new hardware, to reduce longevity and the flourishing of software.
The post you are replying separately mentioned both the "linux kernel" and "linux" so the "Linux is a kernel" pedantry feels misplaced here.
Besides this old debate is pretty silly because I doubt anyone could propose (and get a majority of us to agree on) a formal definition of an operating system that would allow us to unambiguously say "that's an OS competent", "that's an OS", and "that's just software that ships with the OS" across a suite of OS's.
Sure but are those connotation consistent across people (this thread would tend to say no)? If not, that is essentially the core of my argument that nobody agrees on what "OS" means.
Both can be true: a majority of people agree that the is a difference between a 69MB boot and Windows 7; whilst no two people agreeing exactly where to draw that line.
That adds various NT 6 APIs and even compatibility modes for various newer versions of Windows up to Windows 11. At a glance, it appears to have support for Vulkan, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 through software rendering, with the option of using WineD3D to get hardware accelerated Direct3D 10 and 11. I assume old WineD3D-PBA binaries run very nicely on that.
Interestingly, the developer suggests that installing graphics drivers from newer versions of Windows might be possible at some point, which I assume would provide native hardware acceleration for newer graphics APIs and support for recent graphics cards:
> WDDM is not impossible, only very hard. Currently initializes and the subsystem runs, but every driver fails to communicate with it's internal hardware due 2000/XP/2003 doesn't have support for MSI/MSI-X interrupt, required to WDDM drivers works;
Unrelated. Maybe that’s why 69MB of Windows 7 cannot do much, while Linux can run multiple appliances. I’m purposely being sinister here for the fun of it.
Windows containers are a thing, and MS has "Nano Server" base image.
Back in the day, MS did even release Nano Server as a standalone OS, from what I gather it was generally <500MB. Pretty decent for a Windows you could actually run applications on.
I worked on porting certain Software Defined Networking product to Windows platform, for use with Hyper-V. Nano Server was new and we tried to target it as one of the options, especially since it was implied to be recommended way to deploy Hyper-V hosts. And yes, IIRC it took less than 500MB, but it couldn't run most windows applications (for example, GUI was missing).
So much was stripped out that at one point I ended up with reverse-engineered Windows Update packaging (unfortunately lost my notes) because the oldest form of Windows Installer, the one used with INF files for drivers, could not be used fully - specifically, we could not run any kind of action in our own DLL when initializing the drivers. And messing with the right registry keys was fraught with peril.
Do not recall all issues, but essentially we were trying to create a package that could be applied with DISM.EXE onto Nano Server image.
There used to be a much bigger scene around custom Windows installs and I hope it gets resurrected if/when the ability to create local accounts goes away. The desire for a tiny install is pretty niche at this point but I could see demand going up to preserve local accounts.
Or perhaps that won't be necessary because certain enterprise customers will insist on local accounts and it will be easier for pirates to just tap into that install path? One way or another, if/when local accounts go away I hope there's some option to work around it.
It's far more likely such users will just pirate Pro/Enterprise (select "Work" instead of "Home" during the OOBE) than revitalize the customized install media scene around Home. Alternatively, configure the user in autounattend.xml
If you mean when no edition of Windows allows local users... I mean, there's a lot of other things which have to come to Enterprise before we get there. I wonder if Windows will lose relevance before that level of change occurs.
It's a big part of why Microsoft has struggled to kill ALL path to local account, entreprise don't use local but they don't use regular cloud account either, they use active directory account. Which, in windows world, are local account that sync with a local server.
They're pushing hard to push all active directory to Azure AD and the like.
Likely the process is to provision the PC using an AD account, setup a local account, and then disconnect from the network forever. Microsoft isn't going to step on the toes of businesses that need local accounts but they really don't care about upsetting individuals
In reality, truly airgapped PCs are rare. They are usually just there to run some specific application that likely can't run on anything safe to connect to the network. Unless you're both the admin and the only user, an airgapped PC is disadvantageous for security reasons. There's no one monitoring what the users are doing with it, how do you know if anything malicious is running on it if the only reference you have is the PC itself? It's like owning a single clock and never checking to see if the time is actually correct. You're more likely to find airgapped networks that allow for monitoring of the hardware and what users are doing with it. Of course there will always be things like malware testing but with how smart malware is now, it's pretty good at detecting when it running airgapped and won't actually do anything until it knows it can phone home.
Wine won‘t give you a full Windows GUI / desktop environment. That’s the main draw for using Windows non-professionally, besides gaming and the software/hardware ecosystem.
I use Linux daily as a server/VM and hate using Windows as a server, but I've never been happy enough with alternatives to Windows as a desktop when I've tried them.
Why even do that? I don't want a better Windows than Windows so I can run Windows programs on my not-Windows computer.
I want Linux software, instead.
(I'm old enough to have once had a "better Windows than Windows" experience, with OS/2 Warp -- ~30 years ago. It was a very nice system that completely failed to thrive, with many back then blaming its quite good Windows compatibility for that failure.)
Reminds me of when I first started learning computers, there was a version of Windows 3.11 that fit on a single 1.4M floppy. Some of them fit even more stuff by uncompressing the floppy into a ramdisk.
You could even make your own, starting with the file manager from Windows 3.1 and some files from a Windows 95 CD (the installer for 95 ran a stripped down 3.1)
Is it just a minimal set of unmodified files and Windows will gracefully degradate to this? Or did he need to patch everything to be able to strip it down?
Side note.... one thing I wish all cloud provider websites would provide is a recycle bin in the GUI. its far too easy to bulk delete resources, and the cost of a misclick/tampermonkey script bug occurring while doing so can result in a huge qmount of time spent on restoring your service.
I remember hearing about people doing that around the time that windows 98 was still current. It was really impressive.
At the time, the idea of an operating system using a gigabyte of space was a fantasy to most people. Now, I wonder when Microsoft Windows will pass the terabyte threshold.
Assuming that one could get a functional networking stack up, could running `sfc /scannow` fix all the missing pieces, similar to a netboot deployment of Linux?
I have experimented with Tiny Core Linux + Wine, that netted around 100 MB, would be a good starting point for running Windows software on a minimal OS. Certainly would run more software than any Windows cut and shrunk to that size.
Umm, I don't want to nitpick, but what's the purpose of releasing a hotpotch shell of an OS, that doesn't work in even basic functionality?!
Meanwhile Tiny7, Tiny10, Tiny11 entered the chatroom..
And though they are 10x+ bigger in size, they are still barebones Windows OS (without all the clutter that Micro$oft tends to overload on Windows releases these days; I am looking at you Mr.Copilot) that work well for most use cases.
I personally used Tiny11 to set up my home PC, it is compact and usable.
There are an alarming number of people on this site who seriously believe that anything done purely for fun is a waste of time.
They'd annoy me if I didn't feel so bad for them. They're the types who will lament on their death bed that they didn't allow themselves to do more things for enjoyment.
From the thread [0] -
> This was more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable. Virtually nothing can run due to critical missing files such as common dialog boxes and common controls.
[0]: https://x.com/XenoPanther/status/1983579460906487835?t=7jLSz...
If it can't run Windows 7 software, is it really Windows 7?
A question that will truly haunt philosophers for centuries to come
If one replaces a few EXEs and DLLs at a time, at what point does it become Windows 11 ?
When it starts spamming you ads from the taskbar...
If that's the stop point, they'll only end up with Windows 8 and miss out on Recall.
When you need to buy new hardware to boot it.
Without new hardware, old hardware would eventually die.
When that old hardware dies, it would likely be replaced with a similar design rather than more evolved hardware. This would mean we’d have to develop for longevity. Developing for longevity, could mean that software would flourish. Software flourishing could include malware and inefficient software sold to fight malware. Therefore, it is more secure and efficient to continually evolve operating systems to require new hardware, to reduce longevity and the flourishing of software.
It becomes The Windows of Theseus.
Is the a 32 bit version of windows 11?
When it asks for a Microsoft account.
Which it did first time I think vista?
To Linux or not to Linux?
Yes. If you compile just enough linux kernel to just boot and launch a statically compiled init, it’s still linux.
Similarly, this is still windows 7.
Linux is a kernel, Windows is an OS; I don't think the same limits apply. [A static init dose not a Distro make]
The post you are replying separately mentioned both the "linux kernel" and "linux" so the "Linux is a kernel" pedantry feels misplaced here.
Besides this old debate is pretty silly because I doubt anyone could propose (and get a majority of us to agree on) a formal definition of an operating system that would allow us to unambiguously say "that's an OS competent", "that's an OS", and "that's just software that ships with the OS" across a suite of OS's.
Disagree.
"Windows 7" brings a lot of connotations, including the ability to run Windows 7 software. Without that what makes it different to Windows XP?
>"Windows 7" brings a lot of connotations
Sure but are those connotation consistent across people (this thread would tend to say no)? If not, that is essentially the core of my argument that nobody agrees on what "OS" means.
Both can be true: a majority of people agree that the is a difference between a 69MB boot and Windows 7; whilst no two people agreeing exactly where to draw that line.
Ah, good ol’ Windows Theseus
windows xp can run software for windows xp.
If you install the right software, Windows XP reportedly can run most Windows 7 software too:
https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries
That adds various NT 6 APIs and even compatibility modes for various newer versions of Windows up to Windows 11. At a glance, it appears to have support for Vulkan, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 through software rendering, with the option of using WineD3D to get hardware accelerated Direct3D 10 and 11. I assume old WineD3D-PBA binaries run very nicely on that.
Interestingly, the developer suggests that installing graphics drivers from newer versions of Windows might be possible at some point, which I assume would provide native hardware acceleration for newer graphics APIs and support for recent graphics cards:
> WDDM is not impossible, only very hard. Currently initializes and the subsystem runs, but every driver fails to communicate with it's internal hardware due 2000/XP/2003 doesn't have support for MSI/MSI-X interrupt, required to WDDM drivers works;
https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries/i...
Why? If Windows 7 doesnt require the ability to run Windows 7 software to be classed as Windows 7, does XP need to be able to run XP software?
Requirement and ability are different things.
You should tak a look at busybox
Unrelated. Maybe that’s why 69MB of Windows 7 cannot do much, while Linux can run multiple appliances. I’m purposely being sinister here for the fun of it.
From what I have seen in System V init, I definitely needed a dose of a better init.
It almost certainly can run basic CLI apps linked only to kernel32.dll
If this was a linux container, it would be a base image.
I wonder if this could be used to cobble together some duct-tape windows-7-based firecrackers vm thing.
Windows containers are a thing, and MS has "Nano Server" base image.
Back in the day, MS did even release Nano Server as a standalone OS, from what I gather it was generally <500MB. Pretty decent for a Windows you could actually run applications on.
Oh Nano Server, that's a blast from the past.
I worked on porting certain Software Defined Networking product to Windows platform, for use with Hyper-V. Nano Server was new and we tried to target it as one of the options, especially since it was implied to be recommended way to deploy Hyper-V hosts. And yes, IIRC it took less than 500MB, but it couldn't run most windows applications (for example, GUI was missing).
So much was stripped out that at one point I ended up with reverse-engineered Windows Update packaging (unfortunately lost my notes) because the oldest form of Windows Installer, the one used with INF files for drivers, could not be used fully - specifically, we could not run any kind of action in our own DLL when initializing the drivers. And messing with the right registry keys was fraught with peril.
Do not recall all issues, but essentially we were trying to create a package that could be applied with DISM.EXE onto Nano Server image.
> Windows containers
Are people using these in production? I assume so, with libvirt handling them on k8s for a vmware transition option.
Although I don't manage those, I've seen them at work. Running on EKS Windows nodes, for dotnet and SQL Server loads.
Yes, if by people you include Azure in-house engineering teams
I will allow it, once.
Or perhaps applications that just need input and a framebuffer?
Is a working top notch OS and you can do a lot with this bare minimum actually.
Windows 7 couldn't run Windows 7 software either.
> common dialog boxes and common controls.
Ah, makes me reminisce installing Office 6.0 on Windows 3.1 and getting "3D" dialogs, from ctl3d.dll
This post has screenshots of the dialogs: http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?t=14706
I have just releaser the 0MB version of DOS 5.0. It can't run anything as it's zero bytes but hey...
There used to be a much bigger scene around custom Windows installs and I hope it gets resurrected if/when the ability to create local accounts goes away. The desire for a tiny install is pretty niche at this point but I could see demand going up to preserve local accounts.
Or perhaps that won't be necessary because certain enterprise customers will insist on local accounts and it will be easier for pirates to just tap into that install path? One way or another, if/when local accounts go away I hope there's some option to work around it.
It still exists, and it's gotten way more reliable than in years of yore. Check out ameliorated, and its derivative projects, reviOS and Atlas OS.
There's also projects that modify a system less deeply, like Sophia Script.
These days the default windows install is so garbage that I have little issue running semi-open source customizations like these.
It's far more likely such users will just pirate Pro/Enterprise (select "Work" instead of "Home" during the OOBE) than revitalize the customized install media scene around Home. Alternatively, configure the user in autounattend.xml
If you mean when no edition of Windows allows local users... I mean, there's a lot of other things which have to come to Enterprise before we get there. I wonder if Windows will lose relevance before that level of change occurs.
Do any enterprise use local accounts? I guess for airgapped?
It's a big part of why Microsoft has struggled to kill ALL path to local account, entreprise don't use local but they don't use regular cloud account either, they use active directory account. Which, in windows world, are local account that sync with a local server.
They're pushing hard to push all active directory to Azure AD and the like.
I don't know, but I was thinking/hoping maybe the code for local accounts has to live on if at least any enterprise customers demand it.
Likely the process is to provision the PC using an AD account, setup a local account, and then disconnect from the network forever. Microsoft isn't going to step on the toes of businesses that need local accounts but they really don't care about upsetting individuals
In reality, truly airgapped PCs are rare. They are usually just there to run some specific application that likely can't run on anything safe to connect to the network. Unless you're both the admin and the only user, an airgapped PC is disadvantageous for security reasons. There's no one monitoring what the users are doing with it, how do you know if anything malicious is running on it if the only reference you have is the PC itself? It's like owning a single clock and never checking to see if the time is actually correct. You're more likely to find airgapped networks that allow for monitoring of the hardware and what users are doing with it. Of course there will always be things like malware testing but with how smart malware is now, it's pretty good at detecting when it running airgapped and won't actually do anything until it knows it can phone home.
> in reality, truly airgapped PCs are rare.
there is a lot of measuring equipment running Windows
Why not just invest in Wine?
Wine won‘t give you a full Windows GUI / desktop environment. That’s the main draw for using Windows non-professionally, besides gaming and the software/hardware ecosystem.
I use Linux daily as a server/VM and hate using Windows as a server, but I've never been happy enough with alternatives to Windows as a desktop when I've tried them.
Why even do that? I don't want a better Windows than Windows so I can run Windows programs on my not-Windows computer.
I want Linux software, instead.
(I'm old enough to have once had a "better Windows than Windows" experience, with OS/2 Warp -- ~30 years ago. It was a very nice system that completely failed to thrive, with many back then blaming its quite good Windows compatibility for that failure.)
Or ReactOS...
If AI had 1/10 of the promise it's marketed to have, I'd have faith in react OS actually catching up.
I had a bootcamp partition with TinyXP installed on every Intel Mac that I owned.
https://xcancel.com/XenoPanther/status/1983477707968291075
Reminds me of when I first started learning computers, there was a version of Windows 3.11 that fit on a single 1.4M floppy. Some of them fit even more stuff by uncompressing the floppy into a ramdisk.
You could even make your own, starting with the file manager from Windows 3.1 and some files from a Windows 95 CD (the installer for 95 ran a stripped down 3.1)
Slightly related: Back in 2005 Mark Russinovich (Now Azure CTO) managed to disable almost all services in Windows XP
https://web.archive.org/web/20060221142148/https://www.sysin...
Whats the barebones usable version of windows 7? Tiny7?
Is it just a minimal set of unmodified files and Windows will gracefully degradate to this? Or did he need to patch everything to be able to strip it down?
There is Recycle Bin and Folder icon. What a waste of space!
Side note.... one thing I wish all cloud provider websites would provide is a recycle bin in the GUI. its far too easy to bulk delete resources, and the cost of a misclick/tampermonkey script bug occurring while doing so can result in a huge qmount of time spent on restoring your service.
I wish Amazon making an unbridled billions per year, would make an actually usable and halfway decent web console.
Okay fine. They have a lot of services and that would be hard. I'll be happy with ec2, S3, and the other core services.
If they use webdav just use rclone or cadaver.
They want you bulk uploading resources, not deleting.
With some GDI (?) patches, I'm sure they could get rid or slim down some DLLs with resources ;)
Pallet shifts save so many bytes!
Will it still be able to run malware properly? :)
Windows 98 takes ~200Mb after a clean install Windows 95 takes ~50Mb after a clean install
I remember paring down Win98 to 17Mb. And pretty much everything still worked!
I remember hearing about people doing that around the time that windows 98 was still current. It was really impressive.
At the time, the idea of an operating system using a gigabyte of space was a fantasy to most people. Now, I wonder when Microsoft Windows will pass the terabyte threshold.
What would be a use case for this? Or is it for the challenge?
I think it's just a really cool flex
What is it that we use these days that wants small stripped down OS images that we talk about for days and days and days on hacker News?
Squares? Pigeon holes? Cookie jars?
Oh I remember VMs pods and containers
Assuming that one could get a functional networking stack up, could running `sfc /scannow` fix all the missing pieces, similar to a netboot deployment of Linux?
You'd probably need DISM.
I'm fairly sure you need Windows Update components for that
That is even smaller than minimal versions of Windows XP:
https://archive.org/details/smallest-windows-xp-rtm-sp-0
I assume the minimal version of Windows XP still has components that were stripped out of this version of windows 7.
What's the smallest Linux distribution with a graphical desktop?
Tiny Core Linux at 23 MB
http://www.tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html
I have experimented with Tiny Core Linux + Wine, that netted around 100 MB, would be a good starting point for running Windows software on a minimal OS. Certainly would run more software than any Windows cut and shrunk to that size.
Damn Small Linux is 50Mb, and comes with fluxbox, so already beats this version of Windows - but I expect there's some smaller distros.
MuLinux did that in 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux
Also, it looks revived:
https://ptsource.github.io/MuLinux/
Pretty cool. Always wanted the old skool look back in more modern windows
Nice
[flagged]
Umm, I don't want to nitpick, but what's the purpose of releasing a hotpotch shell of an OS, that doesn't work in even basic functionality?!
Meanwhile Tiny7, Tiny10, Tiny11 entered the chatroom..
And though they are 10x+ bigger in size, they are still barebones Windows OS (without all the clutter that Micro$oft tends to overload on Windows releases these days; I am looking at you Mr.Copilot) that work well for most use cases.
I personally used Tiny11 to set up my home PC, it is compact and usable.
Complaining about "purpose" on a website dedicated to hackers, who famously do things on whims for fun, seems slightly futile.
There are an alarming number of people on this site who seriously believe that anything done purely for fun is a waste of time.
They'd annoy me if I didn't feel so bad for them. They're the types who will lament on their death bed that they didn't allow themselves to do more things for enjoyment.
See if it’s possible, learning about how windows works
This is impressive and it also kind of demonstrates how bloated Windows really is. You can fit a ton more functionality into even 1MB.