Taking up a lot of space on your drives for data to maintain backwards compatibility makes sense. Why, when not being actively used, does it need to occupy gigabytes of RAM?

There's no need, which is why it doesn't.

Here's the relevant quote:

> Moreover, removing the Windows Component Store (WinSxS), which is responsible for a fair degree of Tiny11’s compactness, means that installing new features or languages isn’t possible.

my laptop only needs to run a few things:

browser vscode steam the microsoft drawing app some office stuff sublime discord

which all update pretty regularly.

the age of the desktop app has been replaced by the age of the browser and electron based apps. i can imagine businesses who built their own set ups back in the age of the desktop app being stuck with it, but for the most part i dont think i used windows' backwards compatability anymore

Every time I try VS Code I just can’t commit. There’s a bit too much going on and it never feels as tight as Sublime.

I did just get a new Windows machine, so maybe I should try it on that.

I’m starting to get back into emacs recently though because I like fiddling with tools more than productivity.

* Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games.

* Discord is 32-bit.

Discord for example is literally just a chrome-less Chrome; the zoom in/out hotkeys in Chrome still work in it.

This is also not mentioning how no Electron program ever visually adheres to the desktop environment it's running in.

Discord for instance has this “currently playing game X” feature. I have zero interest in broadcasting what I’m doing at the moment to the world, but many do and have this feature enabled. Good luck implementing that in a browser-confined web app.

An example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39569062

No, it also includes:

* Voice (and text chat) overlay for games (DLL)

* Game integration via lobby & rich presence APIs

* Krisp noise cancellation (requires a DLL as well)

* (Better) screenshare (Chrome has an API for window sharing now but Discord's is a bit more robust with several backends in case one fails)

* System-wide keybinds

* Scripting support via gaming accessory apps (Logitech G HUB, HyperX, etc.)

It also (anecdotally) works faster than the web client, in my experience.

Just because the zoom controls work (which is an accessibility feature) doesn't mean it's a barebones Chrome wrapper.

basically a Proton/NixOS for Windows :)

Do you want steam to actually run any game? :D

I use an eeePC laptop with 2 Gb or RAM as my home computer. It's quite usable with Linux.

Not that I'm planning to install Win11 on it, but the assumption that 2GB is enough only for embedded devices is incorrect.

I think that's the point - some people have assumption that 2g is meaningless whereas others see it as HUUUGE amounts of memory. Never mind historically, let us consider what a modern phone can do with 2gb ram.

The remaining content unique to WinSXS is either for cryptographic validation, app compat, or the driver stack.

WinSXS looks like a huge folder in explorer, because explorer's size estimates do not tell you about hard links. It's not that big. I need to question somebody who thinks removing it will remove a lot of bloat.

Get the size of every “file” in the volume along with the file id of each and then subtract the size of any files with a matching file id that are in the WinSxS. Then sum the size of the remaining files that were from the WinSxS.

You can get the file id using https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/... or fsutil, etc.

You could also probably execute “fsutil hardlink list” for every “file” in WinSxS and then ignore any that list more than one result and sum the size of the remainder.

There are of course more efficient ways to do this but those are some quick hacks.

  dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

Any space reclaimed using dism’s startcomponentcleanup is only from removal of superseded updates which normally happens automatically whenever the maintenance task runs after a certain period of time.

Note that I explicitly consider backups separate from superseded updates. Superseded updates are kept for a period of time to allow the user to uninstall a newer update.