I have released a 69.0MB version of Windows 7 x86

190 pointsposted 3 months ago
by rvnx
(twitter.com)

96 Comments

thunderbong

3 months ago

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...

happymellon

3 months ago

If it can't run Windows 7 software, is it really Windows 7?

bhaney

3 months ago

A question that will truly haunt philosophers for centuries to come

BobbyTables2

3 months ago

If one replaces a few EXEs and DLLs at a time, at what point does it become Windows 11 ?

silisili

3 months ago

When it starts spamming you ads from the taskbar...

devsda

3 months ago

If that's the stop point, they'll only end up with Windows 8 and miss out on Recall.

actionfromafar

3 months ago

When you need to buy new hardware to boot it.

abcdump

3 months ago

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.

glonq

3 months ago

It becomes The Windows of Theseus.

hulitu

3 months ago

When it asks for a Microsoft account.

herbst

3 months ago

Which it did first time I think vista?

vpShane

3 months ago

To Linux or not to Linux?

znpy

3 months ago

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.

ZiiS

3 months ago

Linux is a kernel, Windows is an OS; I don't think the same limits apply. [A static init dose not a Distro make]

bragr

3 months ago

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.

happymellon

3 months ago

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?

bragr

3 months ago

>"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.

ZiiS

3 months ago

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.

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

exe34

3 months ago

windows xp can run software for windows xp.

ryao

3 months ago

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...

happymellon

3 months ago

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?

exe34

3 months ago

Requirement and ability are different things.

znpy

3 months ago

You should tak a look at busybox

itopaloglu83

3 months ago

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.

chasil

3 months ago

From what I have seen in System V init, I definitely needed a dose of a better init.

ronsor

3 months ago

It almost certainly can run basic CLI apps linked only to kernel32.dll

znpy

3 months ago

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.

zokier

3 months ago

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.

p_l

3 months ago

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.

esseph

3 months ago

> Windows containers

Are people using these in production? I assume so, with libvirt handling them on k8s for a vmware transition option.

tecleandor

3 months ago

Although I don't manage those, I've seen them at work. Running on EKS Windows nodes, for dotnet and SQL Server loads.

nikanj

3 months ago

Yes, if by people you include Azure in-house engineering teams

nxobject

3 months ago

Or perhaps applications that just need input and a framebuffer?

larodi

3 months ago

Is a working top notch OS and you can do a lot with this bare minimum actually.

zepolen

3 months ago

Windows 7 couldn't run Windows 7 software either.

ulfw

3 months ago

I have just releaser the 0MB version of DOS 5.0. It can't run anything as it's zero bytes but hey...

gdulli

3 months ago

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.

mid-kid

3 months ago

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.

zamadatix

3 months ago

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.

ZiiS

3 months ago

Do any enterprise use local accounts? I guess for airgapped?

gdulli

3 months ago

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.

wildzzz

3 months ago

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.

hulitu

3 months ago

> in reality, truly airgapped PCs are rare.

there is a lot of measuring equipment running Windows

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

nolok

3 months ago

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.

tapoxi

3 months ago

Why not just invest in Wine?

layer8

3 months ago

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.

gdulli

3 months ago

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.

ssl-3

3 months ago

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.)

ayaros

3 months ago

Or ReactOS...

AtlasBarfed

3 months ago

If AI had 1/10 of the promise it's marketed to have, I'd have faith in react OS actually catching up.

sharkjacobs

3 months ago

I had a bootcamp partition with TinyXP installed on every Intel Mac that I owned.

alnwlsn

3 months ago

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)

asadm

3 months ago

Whats the barebones usable version of windows 7? Tiny7?

janci

3 months ago

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?

SoKamil

3 months ago

There is Recycle Bin and Folder icon. What a waste of space!

lazystar

3 months ago

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.

AtlasBarfed

3 months ago

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.

anthk

3 months ago

If they use webdav just use rclone or cadaver.

brazukadev

3 months ago

They want you bulk uploading resources, not deleting.

nxobject

3 months ago

With some GDI (?) patches, I'm sure they could get rid or slim down some DLLs with resources ;)

bombcar

3 months ago

Pallet shifts save so many bytes!

souenzzo

3 months ago

Windows 98 takes ~200Mb after a clean install Windows 95 takes ~50Mb after a clean install

cyberax

3 months ago

I remember paring down Win98 to 17Mb. And pretty much everything still worked!

ryao

3 months ago

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.

sys_64738

3 months ago

Will it still be able to run malware properly? :)

MaiSck

3 months ago

What would be a use case for this? Or is it for the challenge?

pizlonator

3 months ago

I think it's just a really cool flex

AtlasBarfed

3 months ago

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

wingmanjd

3 months ago

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?

shakna

3 months ago

You'd probably need DISM.

    DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

ronsor

3 months ago

I'm fairly sure you need Windows Update components for that

LeoPanthera

3 months ago

What's the smallest Linux distribution with a graphical desktop?

watermelon0

3 months ago

Tiny Core Linux at 23 MB

http://www.tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html

Grom_PE

3 months ago

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.

shakna

3 months ago

Damn Small Linux is 50Mb, and comes with fluxbox, so already beats this version of Windows - but I expect there's some smaller distros.

pacifika

3 months ago

Pretty cool. Always wanted the old skool look back in more modern windows

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

op00to

3 months ago

Nice

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

vee-kay

3 months ago

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.

embedding-shape

3 months ago

Complaining about "purpose" on a website dedicated to hackers, who famously do things on whims for fun, seems slightly futile.

Sohcahtoa82

3 months ago

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.

pacifika

3 months ago

See if it’s possible, learning about how windows works

etaioinshrdlu

3 months ago

This is impressive and it also kind of demonstrates how bloated Windows really is. You can fit a ton more functionality into even 1MB.