>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.

This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users.

You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.

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RajT88 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.

So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.

I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.

	▲	joe_mamba 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD. >but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11 They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement, the other ones are way more important. So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.

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TkTech 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.

	▲	joe_mamba 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe, could also be that for a 9 figure government contract they'll provide a custom LTSC branch just for you with only the features you want.

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hilti an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Never heard of Windows G .. that sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads :-)