Windows 10 Lean appears to live up to its name: an installation is about 2GB smaller than Windows 10 Pro, and it is missing a bunch of things, such as desktop wallpaper, Registry Editor, the MMC management console, and more. Lucan reports that Lean does not seem to apply the same restrictions as S Mode, and as such it is capable of running both Universal Windows Programs from the Store and traditional Win32 applications.
The latest build also has some new telephony APIs, which is fueling speculation of a Surface Phone.
So they strip out things like the regedit, which is less than .5 of a megabyte …
Windows 10 pro requires 20GB of disk space. There’s nothing “lean” about an OS occupying 18GB of your hard drive …
Seems most fresh win10 pro installs occupy about 12 GB of space, but that’s before any updates, restore points, etc.
So let’s be generous and say it actually needs a real 10 GB to start out with. Before any updates, restore points, etc …
So even in the best of cases, it’s still 10 GB.
Again, nothing “lean” about this at all.
The only thing lean about it will be (just speculating you understand) is how thin your wallet will be after enabling all the ‘optional extras’ that you need just to get work done.
Want a media player? That will be $5.99/month
Want a Text editor? Sign here. It will cost an extra $4.99/month
Want To use a printer?
Want to install 3rd party software? $19.99/month
etc
etc
etc
Windows will move to a pure SAAS model.
I hope for the millions of Windows users out there that I’m wrong. I left MS behind for personal use a decade ago so I really don’t care.
> There’s nothing “lean” about an OS occupying 18GB of your hard drive
And to think I remember when 12 *megabytes* for the entire OS was “big”. (Of course, the Mac had a lot of it in a custom ROM chip(s), but still..)
on 1TB storage….18 gigs is lean
And in an ocean, 10 cubic meters of water is nothing.
I don’t see your point …
18GB for a base OS install is not lean.
But how about making it faster and less battery hungry? IMO this is the areas where Windows is still far behind the iOS, macOS and Android.
I have a atom based windows tablet. It often lags so much it responds to input with a some seconds delay. For example tapping an input field may do nothing so you tap it again and then a few seconds later the touch keyboard appears and disappears quickly due to the queued up taps. And putting it to sleep qucikly drains the battery. Even some shitty old android build on the same device didn’t have such problems.
That’s the things I would like to see improved in a “lean” version of windows.
I think the latter depends on the hardware. I have an Android 5.1 tablet with a MediaTek CPU. I use it every evening for two (sometimes three) apps and that’s it, but even that one lags with input and whatnot.
Actually, it scores quite well in power efficiency.
You can tweak linux to be quite efficient (tickless, rapl tweaks, etc), but the major distros at least aren’t very power efficient at all.
Out of the box, i consistently get less out of the battery than people with the same hardware under windows.
Not that i mind that much, it’s a small sacrifice that i am more than willing to make.
Maybe they’re using Firefox to run their OS?
Edited 2018-04-26 01:17 UTC
Windows 7? I love Windows 7 (still use it on my gaming PC, rock solid and hassle free) but it really sucked on netbooks and tablets. I have an AMD Brazos based EEE PC and it was slooow until I slapped on 8.1 with Classic Shell and tada!
Even without swapping the HDD for an SSD (I really should do that one of these days but its a PITA) it boots into a usable state within a few seconds and everything is quite snappy. Considering the unit is an 8 year old netbook (I at least upgraded to 8Gb of RAM so Windows can load everything to RAM instead of using paging) I am quite happy with it and thanks to AMD releasing a Crimson driver that supports any version of Windows from 7-10 when they ended support for the old VLIW GPUs I even get hardware accelerated video that is powerful enough I use it as an HTPC on my 1080p TV when I’m not using it as a portable.
So if its running 7 or even 10? Try Windows 8/8.1 on it. If you don’t like the GUI just slap on classic shell and its not any different than 7 except a hell of a lot snappier on those weaker SOCs.
Windows Phone is lean, without baggage & legacy cruft required by people on their ~desktop Windows; and WinPhone was generally regarded as snappier than iOS or Android, runs very well even on low-end devices like Nokia 520.
Edited 2018-04-27 23:55 UTC
And is no longer supported by Microsoft because no one developed for it and no one bought them.
Maybe people don’t care that much about “lean”…
But I’m not sure about “no one bough them”, it has around the same percentage of usage as desktop Linux, and there are some (also here) who would insist that’s not a failure. ;P
Try using store apps then. The power efficiency of S mode is impressive.
“Let’s strip out akll the useful stuff and leave the decades old abandoned icons, images and other file cruft in!”
They should make version without candy crush soda and other crap, not without admin tools.
C’mon Microsoft, you need to up your game to mobile device manufacturer levels of SKUs. I want a thousand slightly different SKUs every six months, just like Samsung!
I’ve fixed that headline for you.
Windows no longer has its own division and is broken up into multiple parts across the company. No one reporting to the CEO is in charge of windows development outside of people in their org structure doing some work on parts of it.
They could make it “LEANer” by getting rid of WinSxS… That folder is almost always bigger than the rest of the Windows folders combined!
How dumb.