While many like how Windows 11 looks or feels, there are some who just want to cut out on what they feel is bloat as their hardware may not be good enough to run the new OS smoothly, or simply for the fun of it. Recently, a popular third-party Windows 11 tweaking and customization app called ThisIsWin11 (TIW11) evolved into Debloos or Debloat OS, which, as the name suggests, allows the de-bloating of the operating system.
If one isn’t comfortable going about tweaking things themselves with it, they could also opt for Tiny11, which was released earlier today. This stripped-down Windows 11 Pro 22H2 mod requires 8GB of install space, 2GB of system memory, and perhaps the best part, it does not require TPM and Secure Boot.
I always find the custom Windows versions scene fascinating. Legally, it’s a very grey area, but there’s usually some real gems in there, such as this one. As the creator emphasises – this isn’t for production use or for any machine that can run regular Windows 11, but it might be useful in certain niche applications or on older hardware.
I just can’t bring myself to trust a Windows ISO that has been tampered with, no matter the stated intentions of the dev behind it. It’s trivial to add malicious software while disabling built in countermeasures like Windows Defender. It’s more work to take the ISO and pare it down myself, but then if I want a minimalist operating system there’s a whole world of them to choose from that are open source and trustworthy, so why bother with Windows in the first place if you want to keep older hardware running?
“Why bother with Windows in the first place if you want to keep older hardware running?” because Linux often won’t have drivers for the older hardware? Try getting older Via chipsets or AMD/ATI HD4xxx-HD6xxx working on Linux…yeah GLWT as the last drivers for most of that hardware was Ubuntu 6 and of course since Linux has no stable ABI that means unless you can write your own graphics drivers you are SOL.
Meanwhile I have Windows 10 boxes running with Vista drivers and “it just works”, no hassles, no blue screens, 100% functionality. I truly wish the myth of Linux on older hardware was true but unless that older hardware is 100% Intel? Its just not true as both Nvidia and AMD/ATI have huge gaps in their driver support and without drivers it doesn’t matter how well Linux is on memory or CPU its still not suitable for purpose.
Notice I didn’t say Linux anywhere in that comment, but since you mentioned AMD/ATI HD4xxx and HD6xxx support, I give you OpenBSD’s fully supported radeon(4) driver that covers that entire range of GPUs, as well as older and newer devices:
https://man.openbsd.org/radeon.4
Morgan,
Haha, that’s hilarious 🙂
bassbeast, considering the frequency you berate people who talk about linux comparing it to “Man who doesn’t own a TV Onion Parody”, do you appreciate the irony of being the man bent on bringing up linux in order to trash it at every opportunity?
https://www.osnews.com/story/135736/windows-7-and-windows-8-1-reach-the-end-of-the-line/#comment-10427944
Anyway it gave me a good chuckle, carry on!
Does it support full hardware acceleration on the GPUs and APUs? Because if so I’d be happy to try it but the Linux camp also claims “fully supported” but that translates to “gives you a 720P VESA output and no more” which is frankly less than nothing as on older hardware you really need that MPEG and H.264 support to make up for the older CPU.
Tell me you didn’t visit the link without telling me you didn’t visit the link.
I don’t know what the heck you are talking about bassbeast. HD4xxx AMD/ATI is still supported under Linux. ATI closed graphics drivers were discontinued and Mesa open source drivers took over on Linux and many other OSs.
The AMD/ATI HD4xxx/HD6xxx support on OpenBSD is the same as what the Linux distributions have. Mesa3d and the radeon kernel driver. Most people don’t know this but there are drivers in the Linux kernel itself that are MIT licensed this includes the radeon driver. What is in OpenBSD for these old AMD/ATI cards is basically direct port from what inside the mainline Linux kernel.
There are points in time in the Linux world where the vendor drivers are rendered pointless. Out of all the AMD/ATI cards ever released the only ones a Linux distributions will not support are R100 and R200 items.
R100 in marketing=7xxx, 320-345 R200 in marketing=8xxx – 9250 cards yes 2004 and before.
Fun point modern day windows will not work with 2004 and before ATI cards either because the ATI drivers for those cards were not vista compatible.
Mainline Linux kernel has a lot of drivers built in.
oiaohm,
Yeah, linux often gets lots of criticism for lacking hardware support. Sometimes this is fair, but it’s often stated from a position of hypocrisy that puts windows on a pedestal that it doesn’t quite deserve.
A few months ago I intended to rebuilt an old windows computer for the in laws, however windows 10 wouldn’t run the ATI graphics card beyond low res VGA modes. I ended up putting linux on it and that worked. I didn’t set out to install linux, but it ended up supporting the old hardware better. Of course YMMV, I don’t pretend linux is the answer for everyone, but sometimes it’s an option.
Lot of cases the claim of lacking hardware support is not very clear. There is kind of a big difference between new and old hardware.
Windows new hardware can be a better time unless of course the machine is particularly made for Linux. Windows on a pinebook pro and lots of other hardware particularly made for Linux either does not work or is really big trouble. Current Microsoft support editions on Windows on old hardware as you found is path to hell. Yet you always have people like bassbeast turning up saying older hardware Windows is good. The reality older hardware current windows is more often than not failure. Linux not 100 percent on older hardware but way more likely to work.
Now if the GPU in the system was not working right with Windows 10 there is a good odds the CPU is also not to Windows 10 min recommend CPU for instruction set so you can have avoided you in laws having random crashes. Yes this is issue that you can pass the system burn in tests then having complaints of random issues turn up from the people over the year. Linux distribution long CPU support is a big thing on old hardware.
https://support.system76.com/articles/windows/
Yes system76 you attempt Windows 11 on lots of their laptops you are going to be solid ruined. No secureboot support this is a missing bit windows 11 installer has no work around for.
Lot of people complain about lacking hardware support when they are putting Linux on new machines that were not designed to have Linux. Completely missing that there are new machines designed for Linux that you have the same to worse problems with Windows.
Yes brand new 2023 x86 laptop from system76 and you cannot install Windows 11 on it other than in a virtual machine does happen. Yes Windows install on system76 machine no support at all so now Windows user has the same problems and worse as Linux user putting Linux on Windows only machine. Linux distribution other than their own made one system76 will provide some support. This is where I start having problems with the lacking hardware support it not unique to Linux.
Dell and many vendors sell machines with Windows on that are certified to run Linux of course running Linux on one of those machines is quite simple. Of course Dell and many vendors sells machines with Windows on that are only certified to run windows putting Linux on those is luck of the draw might 100 percent right or work with issues. Then you have the system76 machines certified only for Linux luck of the draw here Windows might work or work with issues and quite commonly not at all.
I had a dell laptop where the webcam worked in Linux but not in Windows and it was a machine that came with Windows and had been sold at discount because webcam would not work. Yes the odd driver issue turn up on both sides as well.
Graphics cards, networking and audio are mostly simple you install OS with drivers and they either work or they don’t. CPU support is more of a problem. OS on incompatible x86 CPU at first can appear perfectly normal because you have like race condition crashes.. Motherboard power management incompatibly is just as much of a nightmare as CPU instruction incompatibility crashs and poor battery life. Yes people complain about system76 laptops from time to time for poor battery life after they have installed windows 10. Some dell laptops shipped with Windows switched to Linux have improved battery life. Yes you also see the complaint about laptops that were windows once Linux is put on them having very poor battery life.
Linux is absolutely not the answer for everyone or everything but neither is windows. Reality is both Windows and Linux are lacking hardware support its more a question is the lacking hardware support going to directly effect you. Question when installing OS on computer hardware you need to work out is this OS on this bit of hardware in fact supported if not you are in for trouble of some form as noted above some of the issue might not be noticed straight way.
I was curious about the VIA claim. As I have said elsewhere, I have no specific knowledge. According to Wikipedia though, VIA is supported:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux-supported_computer_architectures
Most VIA CPUs are 32 bit which is a problem on any modern OS ( even SerenityOS has dropped 32 bit and they are barely installable on real HW yet ). There are still totally current 32 bit Linux distros though. It seems that the lack of the CMOV instruction on some VIA CPUs is another wrinkle so most software compiled to i686 as a target may not work.
I guess if I was going to try to target a VIA CPU ( like the C3 board that I probably still have at the bottom of a box somewhere from years ago ), I would probably try the i486 installer for Gentoo and then set the system type to i586 from there. Does anybody here know of a reason that would not work? My guess is that the current release of Gentoo would still “work” on it. I am tempted to carve out an hour or two sometime to try it just for some old-timey nostalgia. I cannot imagine what that hardware will run these days of course as the C3 was a poor competitor to the Pentium II.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.3-Dropping-Old-DRM
I miss ATI 128 being removed but when it comes to ATI/AMD this is all items prior 2004 that are going to be GPU power lacking for the modern desktop.
VIA GPU support with Linux has been questionable for a long time. There is still the openchrome work to give VIA GPUs a modern implementation but its critically short of developers. Running a current kernel on a C3 with VIA GPU acceleration is going to be out while openchrome is not good enough quality to 1 merge 2 to provide the functionality. There is still 1 active developer working on this.
VIA CPU side fairly well supported. VIA GPU side highly questionable and this is not new problem. VIA GPU stuff is basically another powervr item where there was not proper vendor support to start off with let alone latter.
All we have in this thread is anecdotal so I hesitate to respond. That said, I am quite confident that a controlled trial of “typical” and “randomly selected” older hardware platforms would find that Linux support is superior to Windows especially if you want an OS more current than what ran on that hardware to begin with. The ability to run more recent software on older hardware is in fact that most common reason that I install Linux on something ( including old Windows machines but especially older Macs ). Examples can of course be found where any given system is supported by one ecosystem or the other but Linux support for older hardware is lightyears ahead in my experience. A Linux distribution is likely to not only install successfully but also have proper drivers built-in whereas Windows is more likely to require drivers to be “found” somewhere.
To balance the scales, I fully admit that Linux does not do as well on the opposite end of the spectrum. If you have absolutely up-to-date hardware, there is a decent chance that Windows support for it is better and possibly the only real option. Same with Macs of course, especially with the move to Apple silicon. And Linux support can be mixed for companies that go out of their way to be difficult ( eg. NVIDIA and Broadcom ).
Specific to the comment, it does not ring true that Linux would have a problem with that AMD hardware. It has been many years since I tried to bring-up anything using a VIA CPU so any opinions I have on those would be poorly informed. I am sure I ran Linux on them in the distant past though so it would surprise me if there were issues there but I really do not know.
What would be useful to have in such a case is a script you can run to take the content of the ISO and making a working system from that. A script people can read.
I feel the same way, although on some level it seems irrational. If you’re installing a binary image, it requires trusting whoever assembled the image, even if the underlying components are open source. “Reflections on trusting trust” seems relevant here – even if you did Linux from Scratch to avoid using somebody else’s binaries, it depends on having a “clean” host system that can be used as a cross-compiler, and that system is going to end up trusting somebody’s binaries.
For better or worse, we’re living in a world that assumes and requires a trustworthy community of developers on the Internet, despite knowing that not all developers deserve that level of trust. Even if you only deal with “reputable” commercial software, that software is built on open source components, and is trusting those authors to not insert vulnerabilities.
I can’t even trust the official ones from Microsoft. At one point, (back when I cared about nothing except playing video games all day), I would have said that in jest, but now I really do feel that way. See recent stories in the news for examples as to why. Windows has become “adversarial software”, like most things surrounding modern video games. The only time I will even think about running those types of programs, is on an air-gapped system.
Many like the look and feel of Windows 11? What is many? the mothers of the designers at redmond?
“1. Tiny11 is not serviceable, but .NET, drivers and security definiton updates can still be installed from Windows Update.”
But Windows security patches cannot, if I understand the bit about removing the SXS store correctly – that’s what is used to apply patches and allow rolling them back. Therefore it cannot get its security holes patched, and is NOT secure.
I applaud this effort and the initiative. I would not install it myself until it is much better documented and reviewed. I love the idea of a ‘tiny Windows 11’ but would need to know a lot more before I would trust it. I didn’t find much in the way of documentation.
AndrewZ,
The entire thing seems to be open source:
https://github.com/builtbybel/ThisIsWin11
https://github.com/builtbybel/Debloos
However split between two repositories (where the second one is basically “empty”), and not very well documented.
Looks like depends on Powershell,
https://github.com/builtbybel/ThisIsWin11/blob/20fff4861dfd744113cbd1399c8623983f1e0310/src/TIW11/Views/AppsWindow.cs#L13
and batch files:
https://github.com/builtbybel/ThisIsWin11/blob/main/collections/tpm_off.bat
To clean up packages and settings.
So, probably safe in general, but might have bugs that might make your Windows installation not useful anymore.
Those indeed are open. The main story is about Tiny11 from NTDEV which is closed.
I see.
You mean this thing, right?
https://archive.org/details/tiny-11_202302
It seems like just a stripped version of Windows (using those open source tools), and then converted to an image.
To alleviate concerns, we can actually do this ourselves:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/capture-and-apply-windows-using-a-single-wim?view=windows-11
Needs a Windows PE environment, but I think Rufus can easily take care of that.
“Dev explains why Tiny11 Windows is so tiny yet secure despite no TPM, Secure Boot”
And the actual comment was “it’s still pretty secure” which can be interpreted as “no it isn’t”.
For me, the absolute best use case for these “debloated” Windows options is to run them in a VM. I cannot imagine that I would ever want this as my main OS but, with a VM, size absolutely matters both in terms of image size and of course even more-so with RAM. If I had to run two or three Windows VMs, this stripped down version sounds very attractive.
I ran Windows for Legacy PCs ( an official light-weight Windows XP version ) as my primary Windows in VMs right up until the Windows 10 era. Lately, I have run Windows 10 with the debloating from Chris Titus. Being able to get something installable via something like Tiny11 sounds attractive.