This Is Windows 11 In Its Barest Form, With No GUI To Speak Of

This Is Windows 11 In Its Barest Form, With No GUI To Speak Of

Admittedly, Windows as an operating system is quite the resource hog when you compare it to something like a Linux-based system – so there’s a small community that aims to cut down on unneeded stuff on Windows 11 to make sure it fits and runs on the old laptops you may have sitting in a corner.

However, sometimes this technical exercise becomes a bit of a science question of “how far can we go?”, and so we see attempts like fitting Windows 11 into a system with just 200MB of RAM. But what happens when you strip off literally every single non-essential function of the operating system down to its very bone? As NTDEV demonstrates, it basically looks like the stuff you see from the MS-DOS days (which was at least 30 years ago).

This ultimate form of weight-saving measure involves a completely text-based system, leaving no elements of GUI (graphical user interface) for Windows to deal with. The whole ISO image is only 100MB (1.91GB after installation), and today we have applications that easily exceed this figure. Despite this regime, you can still multi-task according to the creator – though such a concept in a command-line system hardly makes sense.

To give you some context, a normal Windows installation will require 64GB of storage space – which shows just how extreme this stripped-down install of Windows 11 gets. However, despite its lightweight nature, NTDEV noted that performance isn’t great despite running without any GUI on it, and one can see just how slow it responds to ‘dir’ commands when listing the files within the directory.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Pokdepinion: At this point it’s not far off to call it “MS-DOS 11”.