But you’ll need a powerful system with 64GB of RAM to use it.
Microslop thinks that “Clutter free” means “bundled with an always on LLM” 😸
The goal, really, is to cut the crud out of Windows to create a more Linux-like experience.
LOL. I’ll just keep using Linux, thank you very much. Great article though:
[…] demanding 64GB of RAM in the age of the RAMaggedon seems inexcusable. (Especially because Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI and its overall AI push is a big reason memory prices have skyrocketed.)
requires 64gb ram
Bitch, l’m running an up-to-date distro on my 8GB netbook!
Plenty of memory addresses to go around with 64gb of RAM. Take your pick.
Dma<Elephant>
64GB of RAM to use it.
Does that mean it does not run on my beloved Thinkpad X220 with 4GB?
Looks like I am stuck with running Debian 13 on it.
Fun fact, at $currentwork there are two true believers in AI and somehow they managed to procure me a laptop for home office which weights in roughly 9 kilograms - a bit more than six times as heavy as my 12 year old X220. Must be the battery which is needed to power the NVidia graphics card.
The best part about Microsoft is removing it from a computer so you can watch Linux being installed.
Don’t be so mean. You can do many useful things on windows. Like for example selecting Linux distro, downloading it and saving on an USB.
Don’t be so mean? Sometimes I use Edge to download a new browser then uninstall Windows.
Like for example selecting Linux distro, downloading it and saving on an USB.
Using an USB thing is the somewhat decadent newfangled way to do things. The more classy way was to download the whole distro to an 1.44 MB floppy drive. \installation was by
dd .... of=/dev/fd0. Yeah, it required 16 megabytes of RAM. It was possible to boot it on an 386 PC. Though kernel compiles were a bit lengthy.Why not just PXE boot it over the token ring network?
Didn’t have a network card.
Gotta test it out after the upgrade to 10Mb/s Ethernet!
Whoah! Did you build the new kernel for it? This UDP stuff is crazy.
I hope everyone uses this new UDP thing!
That’s more fun on Linux though.
You need 64 GB or RAM to use it? Seems like it’s just a marketing gimmick to find dumb developers who can afford 64GB of RAM in the first place. Kind of like that “I am Rich” app…
it’s 64gb so you can run local ai models to ‘re-clutter’ your windows experience.
Some of us bought our 64gb of ram when it was cheap.
I have 128gb. I didn’t need 128gb but it was a good deal and thought fuck it, i spent too much into AM4 anyway might as well go all in and not bother with AM5 for another four years if ever.
I rarely manage to time anything correctly for market fluctuations, but for once I hit it right on the head when I built this machine last summer.
I am curious, how many of the Lemmy/piefed/mbin servers can meet this requirement. I know only lemmy.world that does.
The goal, really, is to cut the crud out of Windows to create a more Linux-like experience.
but
for powerful developer hardware with 64GB of RAM and gobs of memory bandwidth.
???
They probably try to keep the normal users out, so that their
spy-ware infestednormal version is still the default for most of the users.Either that or they didn’t remove the crud but replaced it with AI crud that needs the RAM.
If their idea of distraction-free requires 64GB of RAM, they’re pretty lost as a company.
I don’t get it either.
If they said “requires a beefy dGPU or one of the handful of high-bandwidth APUs” that feels like it would make more sense than just 64G RAM. I thought most models weren’t optimized to run on a CPU even with gobs of RAM.
And plenty of firms don’t ship their devs 64G machines, especially in ghe current RAM crunch. Mine sent me a 16G machine in like 2023 and only replaced it with 32 on request because Win11+Docker were heavier than the old Win10/external server workflow.
You believed Microslop once, that’s on them. You believed Microslop twice, that’s on you.
It’s called zenith because it only gets worse from here
Clearly, the focus is on local AI development — a timely move as cloud AI token costs start to rise.
This is called burying the lede.
If Microsoft knows this cloud-based AI thing is a bust and people will be moving to local models that are not controlled by Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic, then it’s only a few months before Satya tells his investors buddies and the bubble pops.
I find this unlikely… IMO I think they are hedging in both directions.
Personally I like the idea of local AI. open source models that you an control, decide, and use smartly, sort your things etc… and not pay an absurd cost or link up.
Personally I think MS is actually betting on the opposite. IE they had a prototype windows that was basically just an AI prompt, no start menu etc… and applications just “streamed”.
IMO I think that’s more of the goal, use the data center buildout to drive up hardware prices, until people cannot afford a basic PC. Sell thin clients… then sell us “access” to compute in a form where we own nothing, but pay by the processes used etc…
I’m pretty sure local models still induce pyschosis and hallucinate. Maybe the cat’s out of the bag, but they still suck.
They absolutely do suck, but I can see some practical uses for them. IE I can see LLM’s as useful in localized specialized uses. for me I’d really like basically LLM as a like calendar, scheduling kind of thing, also say translating home assistant commands through a voice assistant to make it figure out actual intent etc…, nothing super mission critical, but also mostly things I wouldn’t want any 3rd party service that could change the rules for me, share them to others etc…
I agree it’s a hedge, but I think it’s a pretty big admission that the writing is on the wall.
Given how much Windows has invested in cloud AI, that they are encouraging developers–the sweetest plum, the people most likely to pay for cloud AI–a local environment is a pretty big admission. This is the sort of thing corporations that have the ability to control markets don’t do unless they think the market is going to leave them behind.
64GB would be on the short side for local AI stuff today, 128 with some 80-96 shared for vram is probably a better start. IMO.
Is this their follow up to the wildly successful Project Test Everything In Production?
They never stopped that one, actually
Zero details about what clutter they’re going to remove…
E: Reading the original Windows release does not mention anything at all about decluttering. They do call it “distraction-free” at one point, but no elaboration on what that means…
Given the memory requirement, my guess is that they’re not removing anything, just hiding it. And adding more useless crap on top.
The users.
It will be interesting to see what the price point is for Zenith, and the hardware needed to run it.
Who pays for Windows
If they actually cut the bloat and had a bare bones system it would be a half decent OS. It would be able to get away with less ram and faster response. The only issue is that would not look good for there stock value.
Modern windows 2000 please.
While we’re at it, a real CLI, please. Running a full GUI and popping up a Power Shell window doesn’t count.
I don’t understand, do you not like Windows Terminal? I have found it to be one of the better parts of Windows 11. It isn’t perfect, but miles better than cmd.
they probably don’t like having to run a full gui for basic text commands control
Yeah, I was referring to Windows Server Core. They had an opportunity to implement a proper CLI and marketed it that way. Instead it still runs the full GUI, but just sets cmd.exe as the shell instead of explorer.exe
lol no that won’t happen
