Basically, install Windows as you normally would, but when asked for Time and Currency format, select English (World) instead of your country.
Then let the installer do its thing. Eventually, you will see a window with an ice cream cone on the floor with the words “Something went wrong” and the error message “OOBEREGION.” This cryptic message means that the “out of box experience” (OOBE) didn’t launch because it didn’t know which region to launch.
Click Skip, though, and Windows will install just fine. You won’t be prompted to buy Microsoft 365, you won’t be prompted to pay for a OneDrive subscription, and your Start menu won’t be cluttered with apps.
That is still comically high. Arch Linux with DWM gets 100 mb, I’ve seen gentoo builds with DWM get as low as 40 mb.
KDE looks better than windows and it gets a third of the ram idle usage at most.
I had Debian Ubuntu and Void use little over 1 GB in the past
For windows it’s insanely low RAM usage. For me 3-3.5 GB RAM used on idle was the windows standard
Exactly. Every time before I found out about LTSB and these scripts my idle usage wasn’t lower than 3-3.6gb. I went through all those running processes and said myself that there has to be better way. (And boy how I was pissed off when I found out about the telemetry…) It led me to Linux, but sometimes I need to use Windows so I have dual-boot with LTSB.
I’ve never seen windows idle that much from a clean install.
Idle RAM usage means literally nothing.
Also don’t forget that to reach 40 MB RAM you have to strip your system out of literally everything. Sometimes it makes a miserable user experience.
Not really. I can see why you’d think that but you just compile a kernel that supports what you need. A kernel customized for your hardware can be less than half the size of the default kernel, it’s just that it may function ONLY on that hardware.
Alright, but how many kernel wizards are out there?
You’re missing the point here. That is to save at best 60 mb. Arch with KDE still maxes out at like 500 mb of usage.