The message from users is clear, but Microsoft refuses to listen: we need a much lighter version of Windows, without the unnecessary load of its services, and with a more compatible profile on modest machines. What was Redmond's strategy regarding Windows 11? Impose absurd hardware requirements and add more junk. Fortunately, users did not stay idle, and amid all this chaos ideas emerge like the Tiny11 project by NTDEV, which sets out to gut Windows 11 and remove its bloatware.
With more than a year on the market, Windows 11 has still not managed to break the 20 percent adoption milestone worldwide. Of course, this is due to Microsoft's policies: by declaring entire generations of processors as "incompatible" and demanding higher hardware-backed security parameters, the consequence is that many users decided to take the upgrade slowly... or ignore it completely.
But the real problem is that there are no legacy editions of Windows with support left either. Windows 7 and 8.x ended their journey in January, and only a few more obscure integrated builds will continue to receive patches. Currently, Windows 10 "is" the legacy edition, but the requirements of Windows 11 do not enable any upgrade path without changing hardware... unless we modify it completely. That's what the Tiny11 project proposes.
Tiny11: The Windows 11 we all dream of
This build created by NTDEV (whom we remember for his tests on Windows 10 and his low-performance experiments with Windows 7) quickly distances itself from the official images. All it asked during installation was a username and a password: no online accounts, no additional services, and no hacks to escape those annoyances. Although it was necessary to disable some things (location, etc.), the truth is that the entire process took only a few minutes. The only warning is that Tiny11 only comes in English.
Once on the desktop, we discover that Microsoft Edge is conspicuously absent, as are OneDrive and Cortana. The apps that appear in the start menu are nothing more than links to webapps, and can be easily removed. Tiny11's RAM consumption while idle does not seem to exceed 1.5 GB of RAM, but the most impressive thing is the disk size: its complete installation landed right at the threshold of 10 gigabytes.
The disappearance of Edge in Tiny11 will surely delight many users, but it also means we must copy the installer of some browser, or alternatively, use the Windows Store to get Firefox. No, the store hasn't gone anywhere, nor have many privacy options that need to be disabled.
Beyond those details, all the doubts surrounding Tiny11 are about security. For the moment there is no reason to think NTDEV has malicious intentions with Tiny11, but the logical thing is to subject the operating system to a long evaluation session before moving forward with it.
Download Tiny11 from the Internet Archive: Click here
