The best part about Microsoft is removing it from a computer so you can watch Linux being installed.

Don’t be so mean. You can do many useful things on windows. Like for example selecting Linux distro, downloading it and saving on an USB.

That’s more fun on Linux though.

Like for example selecting Linux distro, downloading it and saving on an USB.

Using an USB thing is the somewhat decadent newfangled way to do things. The more classy way was to download the whole distro to an 1.44 MB floppy drive. \installation was by dd … of=/dev/fd0. Yeah, it required 16 megabytes of RAM. It was possible to boot it on an 386 PC. Though kernel compiles were a bit lengthy.

Why not just PXE boot it over the token ring network?

Gotta test it out after the upgrade to 10Mb/s Ethernet!

Whoah! Did you build the new kernel for it? This UDP stuff is crazy.

I hope everyone uses this new UDP thing!

Didn’t have a network card.

Heh, I remember another distro called Floppix — small enough to fix on two floppy disks

There is also Knoppix, designed for rescue purposes.

Don’t be so mean? Sometimes I use Edge to download a different browser then uninstall Windows.

And you can use its image creation tool to write a Windows installer .iso to a thumbdrive, for others who absolutely have to have it!

Fucked if I can work out why downloading the Windows .iso in Linux and writing it to USB has not once resulted in a bootable medium for me, despite literally every non-MS .iso working perfectly with the same tools.

Lol I just found my burned CD-ROM of windows 10. I seem to remember asking on reddit how I can get a disk copy when they were offering a free upgrade from windows 7 to windows 10. Everyone clowned on me and downvoted and saying I was ridiculous for asking such a thing. Looks like I figured it out somehow.

Is asking for a physical copy such a ridiculous request lol? It gives me peace of mind that I can reinstall whenever.

Whatever, I’ve since moved onto Linux only for the last 5 years or so. The days of dual booting are long behind me. Funny enough in that pile of CD-ROMs was Ubuntu 10.04, the first distro I ever used. I remember doing a bunch of convoluted bullshit to get Oblivion to run on WINE haha.

The goal, really, is to cut the crud out of Windows to create a more Linux-like experience.

but

for powerful developer hardware with 64GB of RAM and gobs of memory bandwidth.

???

If their idea of distraction-free requires 64GB of RAM, they’re pretty lost as a company.

640K ought to be enough for anyone

I don’t get it either.

If they said “requires a beefy dGPU or one of the handful of high-bandwidth APUs” that feels like it would make more sense than just 64G RAM. I thought most models weren’t optimized to run on a CPU even with gobs of RAM.

And plenty of firms don’t ship their devs 64G machines, especially in ghe current RAM crunch. Mine sent me a 16G machine in like 2023 and only replaced it with 32 on request because Win11+Docker were heavier than the old Win10/external server workflow.

Why do developers need 64GB+ RAM on their computers? Maybe I’m biased as a Ruby on Rails web application developer but I’m happily squeaking by on just 8GB RAM. Maybe they’re developing with the memory-hungry VS Code?

I thought it was the gamers who needed tons of RAM.

Visual Studio, VS Code, WSL2, docker containers, SQL Server + SSMS, MS Teams, …

Usually all at the same time. Not everyone is doing just web dev.

Teams, Visual Studio, VS Code are trash, they leak memory like no other

WSL2 is hilarious, just run Linux/UNIX?

SQL Server and SSMS are trash

I run Docker quite a bit but if you’re actually writing the containers efficiently it shouldn’t be sucking down ~64GB of RAM. But I’ve also seen how people shovel things like Java, log rotation, etc. into those containers because they act like it’s a 1994 VPS.

I got the same impression. That dev work isn’t power hungry, just the stack is. But if IT controls the stack, that explains some of the dilemma.

Why an RDBMS on the local though? Testing shit doesn’t make sense to name it as a regular piece of software.

I always build against a local DB?

For our desktop / LAN software the DB will always be local.

For web, it’s easier since I’m likely to burn the DB down over and over during early development / prototyping. But I’m not using cloud hosted DB even in production, and don’t expose Postgres outside the DB server, so I find it easier to work on this way.

EDIT: I also think that a default installation of VS includes SQL Server. I don’t use it, so always have to adjust the installation and remove all of those bits, but I also have complete control of my environment. I could see an IT department just doing a stock VS installation with the required workloads.

Yeah sorry, that’s what I meant by testing stuff. I suppose if you’re always testing things in the DB, it makes sense. Usually in my case, I would spin up a Postgres instance only for the week or so that I’m developing and testing with it. Eventually I push to cloud though. I don’t keep it running locally unless I’m testing a change. But I’m not testing changes often… I wouldn’t consider it part of my stack for that reason. I might run a local RDBMS a few times a year.

On the other hand, I will use SQLite or DuckDB all the time for local work. Not sure if those count as RDBMS, they are serverless.

I won’t never consider a local RDBMS as having stable data storage, so it falls into a strictly “testing” category for me, I guess “development and testing” is more accurate.

I could totally see that for the web stuff where I only make changes a couple of times a year. Usually when working on those I just delete the local DB before I start to keep it clean, but spinning up a new copy would be more efficient.

For our desktop apps / server Postgres is always installed locally on the machine, so keeping it there mirrors “production”.

I spent most of my time working on those apps and services, or working on the Android client (or both at the same time when a feature requires that both change), and often on a copy of actual customer data as we do a lot of custom work for clients.

Yeah, that’s exactly the process- while you are building out a feature it hits a local DB and once it’s ready to integrate you push it to a shared environment.

If you break dev, coworkers be mad

When you work on backend services you have a local DB running 24/7. Changes don’t go onto the actual dev environment until locally tested, or you might just break things for 50 other people.

This is on my work PC, I can’t just switch there (:

For .NET development Visual Studio and Rider are the only decent options, everything else is “trash”. Teams is the company communication tool (besides Outlook).

And we run SQL Servers in Azure, PostgreSQL would cost the same (but I’d love to switch to it myself).

You don’t need 64 GB of RAM, I was happy with 48 GB too, but the headroom is nice. 32 GB would be borderline for my work though, especially as I often have two heavy backend services open (2x Visual Studio) plus a Python project for automated tests (VS Code).

VS has an option that I think was called Launch With, or something like that, so you can run two services together.

Aspire also let’s you do this more easily.

Not everyone does the same development process as you.

And I’m sure we all work at places that allow us to change the entire tech stack and switch away from teams /s

Be realistic, there are many reasons you need all of these things and more. Why are you trashing other people so much?

run Docker quite a bit but if you’re actually writing the containers efficiently it shouldn’t be sucking down ~64GB of RAM

In Windows when you run a docker container a full Linux VM is run, so it uses gigabytes of memory

Oh my god. Do people really live like this? I’m going to be sick…

I’ve worked on large C++ applications and it’s worth having a beefy machine. Each source file can be compiled in parallel so you save time by having a ton of CPU cores and memory.

Yeah for most projects the only time you need a workstation-class machine is to cut down on compile times. Every time you make a change and run you have to compile; a process you do possibly hundreds of times per day benefits immensely from even being just 1-2 seconds faster

It’s also useful if you have a lot of unit tests that can be run in parallel.

I build windows software, so need Windows and VS. I keep my entire development environment in a virtual machine. I also have a couple of other VMs for client isolation, clean installation testing, etc.

So having that much memory allows me to run more than one virtual machine at a time, and keep enough reserve for my actual desktop.

It was also my first rebuild in over 12 years, and RAM prices hadn’t gone stupid yet, so I figured I’d drop a few more $ and build another decade+ future proof machine.

I do use quite a bit, but I also do a lot of different things. Compiling code, running docker containers, local web servers, an android emulator, slack, browser tabs for Jira/confluence/figma/etc., all adds up pretty quick.

8GB is definitely nowhere near enough, at least for what I need to do.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

I develop in containers, which means I don’t have to install dependencies on my host.
While it’s overhead, it’s never that massive.
Sure things like Codium and all the tooling takes up a lot of memory… I don’t think I’ve seen over 10gb of “dev related” memory.
I feel like people are significantly desensitized about how much data 1GB actually is.

Sometimes you use big datasets. I needed 64GB (well, I only needed more than 32 to be fair, but 5-6 years ago it wasn’t that expensive) to figure out a bug in data going over 32bits number of indices on a gpu.

But usually 32GB has been largely enough for most stuff, I even only have 16 on my laptop but I don’t do large stuff any more.

Its AI.

8 GB woyldn’t be nearly enough to run a large enterprise server while also running all my other apps in the background. At work I use a MacBook with 48 GB of RAM and the memory pressure regularly goes into yellow.

They probably try to keep the normal users out, so that their spy-ware infested normal version is still the default for most of the users.

Either that or they didn’t remove the crud but replaced it with AI crud that needs the RAM.

Clearly, the focus is on local AI development — a timely move as cloud AI token costs start to rise.

This is called burying the lede.

If Microsoft knows this cloud-based AI thing is a bust and people will be moving to local models that are not controlled by Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic, then it’s only a few months before Satya tells his investors buddies and the bubble pops.

I find this unlikely… IMO I think they are hedging in both directions.

Personally I like the idea of local AI. open source models that you an control, decide, and use smartly, sort your things etc… and not pay an absurd cost or link up.

Personally I think MS is actually betting on the opposite. IE they had a prototype windows that was basically just an AI prompt, no start menu etc… and applications just “streamed”.

IMO I think that’s more of the goal, use the data center buildout to drive up hardware prices, until people cannot afford a basic PC. Sell thin clients… then sell us “access” to compute in a form where we own nothing, but pay by the processes used etc…

I agree it’s a hedge, but I think it’s a pretty big admission that the writing is on the wall.

Given how much Windows has invested in cloud AI, that they are encouraging developers–the sweetest plum, the people most likely to pay for cloud AI–a local environment is a pretty big admission. This is the sort of thing corporations that have the ability to control markets don’t do unless they think the market is going to leave them behind.

64GB would be on the short side for local AI stuff today, 128 with some 80-96 shared for vram is probably a better start. IMO.

Is this their follow up to the wildly successful Project Test Everything In Production?

They never stopped that one, actually

Fool me once… maybe we can try to fool them for the hundredth time.

You had me for the first half

Zero details about what clutter they’re going to remove…

E: Reading the original Windows release does not mention anything at all about decluttering. They do call it “distraction-free” at one point, but no elaboration on what that means…

The users.

Given the memory requirement, my guess is that they’re not removing anything, just hiding it. And adding more useless crap on top.

A developer who needs windows, for whatever reason ever, is going to be able to pull of and setup most of these system settings and apps in under an hour.

Then on the other hand, I downloaded, installed and base configured my new laptop with linux while commuting for one hour on the train. lol

You believed Microslop once, that’s on them. You believed Microslop twice, that’s on you.

Why doesn’t Microsoft just use AI to fix their shit products? I thought AI was the future and Microsoft is OpenAI’s largest shareholder so this should be a slam dunk.

Win 11 IOT enterprise LTSC already exists and doesn’t even require a TPM.

Unless this is a legitimate channel for regular users to get IOT enterprise LTSC, this is a non-story. The thing we want already exists, they just refuse to sell it.

Lmao

rofl, even.

You need 64 GB or RAM to use it? Seems like it’s just a marketing gimmick to find dumb developers who can afford 64GB of RAM in the first place. Kind of like that “I am Rich” app…

Some of us bought our 64gb of ram when it was cheap.

I have 128gb. I didn’t need 128gb but it was a good deal and thought fuck it, i spent too much into AM4 anyway might as well go all in and not bother with AM5 for another four years if ever.

I rarely manage to time anything correctly for market fluctuations, but for once I hit it right on the head when I built this machine last summer.

I almost did the same but settled on 64GB :`(

I am curious, how many of the Lemmy/piefed/mbin servers can meet this requirement. I know only lemmy.world that does.

it’s 64gb so you can run local ai models to ‘re-clutter’ your windows experience.

It’s called zenith because it only gets worse from here

This had me in stitches, damn you.

requires 64gb ram

Plenty of memory addresses to go around with 64gb of RAM. Take your pick.

Dma<Elephant>

Bitch, l’m running an up-to-date distro on my 8GB netbook!

I’m sure the event viewer, resource monitor, etc will support hidpi with this right and it’s not just gonna be another Ui layer painted on top of all the old ones like a shitty apartment where you can cut the wall and count the layers of paint

If they actually cut the bloat and had a bare bones system it would be a half decent OS. It would be able to get away with less ram and faster response. The only issue is that would not look good for there stock value.

Modern windows 2000 please.

While we’re at it, a real CLI, please. Running a full GUI and popping up a Power Shell window doesn’t count.

I don’t understand, do you not like Windows Terminal? I have found it to be one of the better parts of Windows 11. It isn’t perfect, but miles better than cmd.

they probably don’t like having to run a full gui for basic text commands control

Yeah, I was referring to Windows Server Core. They had an opportunity to implement a proper CLI and marketed it that way. Instead it still runs the full GUI, but just sets cmd.exe as the shell instead of explorer.exe

I would pay like big bucks for a no nonsense interference that just ran shit i wanted without 900 services doing god knows what

64GB of RAM to use it.

Does that mean it does not run on my beloved Thinkpad X220 with 4GB?

Looks like I am stuck with running Debian 13 on it.

Fun fact, at $currentwork there are two true believers in AI and somehow they managed to procure me a laptop for home office which weights in roughly 9 kilograms - a bit more than six times as heavy as my 12 year old X220. Must be the battery which is needed to power the NVidia graphics card.

lol no that won’t happen

It will be interesting to see what the price point is for Zenith, and the hardware needed to run it.

Who pays for Windows

The goal, really, is to cut the crud out of Windows to create a more Linux-like experience.

LOL. I’ll just keep using Linux, thank you very much. Great article though:

[…] demanding 64GB of RAM in the age of the RAMaggedon seems inexcusable. (Especially because Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI and its overall AI push is a big reason memory prices have skyrocketed.)

Microslop must be getting tired of all the winning.

/s, obviously

I mean, if they are playing most on target hits with a footgun they are winning big time.

“Our new product is our old product with fewer kicks in the face.”

Clearly, the focus is on local AI development — a timely move as cloud AI token costs start to rise.

AI token costs are only rising for people with low AI proficiency who compensate for that by just using expensive models for everything. For others, the costs are dropping quite a lot, largely thanks to Chinese models (GLM, Kimi, Qwen, etc.)

If it was “clutter free”, it would not need 64GB. It might even work with 4GB or less.

the gui is clutter free. why do you think it takes over a minute for windows to show the drop down right click menu.