I have absolutely no faith or reason to believe that this is something Microsoft can do.

2027 is more likely, with a plethora of fuck ups and destruction along the way. Whats most likely is they just don't and instead do something that, in a way, "fakes it" by ripping resources from things or has the CPU fan spinning loudly.

Windows, in its current state, is a monster compiled of decades of shit and band-aids.

Can’t they just ask copilot to optimise win11 for less ram?

No matter what they do, they'll still be far greater in terms of memory consumption than the most bloated Linux desktop environment.

I already have 8GB RAM PC optimization at home. It's called Linux.

But having tested Windows Insider builds for months now, hands-on with the new decluttered Search and the faster File Explorer, I’m inclined to believe Microsoft can pull this off.

Microsoft has already rebuilt the File Explorer Properties dialog in WinUI, Microsoft’s native UI framework that’s significantly lighter than WebView2 since it doesn’t need to spin up a browser engine just to render a dialog box, and confirmed plans to bring more of the OS onto the framework.

What a nonsensical statement - they make it sound like the windows properties dialog was WebView2/Electron, but in fact it was Win32 api; WinUI is going to be much heavier. The bloat continues

This sounds more like Microsoft knew they included more bloat and are deciding to remove some of it because of the artificial chip shortage in lieu of all these data centers and AI.

They're not doing it to help anyone but themselves. They likely bloated Windows to make it only work well enough on the hardware they chose to. Corrupt as always.

I'll believe it when I see it, but maybe this is why my 4 year old laptop is near unusable on windows 11 :(

They just updated the minimum requirements for minecraft from 4 to 8gb. You can't even run windows with 4gb. 8 is not gonna do great either.

Well, they do have a great track record of memory efficient and reliable OS like... 95... no, 98... ME? Vista? 8? So good.

The only possible way is to downgrade to Windows 7 before they screwed up the NT kernel and replaced all of their solid userspace applications with PWA bloat.

Did we need confirmation?

Here's hoe they can remove 8gb of ram usage: remove the shitty AI that windows 11 users can't delete anymore. I remove it at the registry level and every update still adds it back in... just like that stupid xbox game bar that keeps pinning itself to my task bar every update.

I’m going against the wind here….

But the real heroes are old smartphones.

My iPhone 4 had 512MB RAM. Yet even hacked and modded and themed, it flew. It was so smooth, always usable, futuristic feeling; it honestly jammed up less than my iPhone 16.

Heck. It jammed up less than my desktop does now, with literally 300X the RAM.