What you need to know
- NTDev never gives up on their pursuit of the tiniest Windows OS
- They have been releasing more and more small versions of Windows in the last few months.
- This newest OS is a mere 100MB and strips out most of everything in Windows including the GUI.
The main version of Tiny11 recently got a new update. However, in what seems to be a side project, NTDev has released a short video on YouTube showing just how great aspirations can end in small packages. The video shows a user loading up a Windows 11 operating system and running mininit.exe.
I don’t know the exact use case for something this small. Still, like so many human escapades, sometimes it’s just the journey that provides the catalyst, whether setting a new world record for a speed run or being the first to break the 4-minute mile; there is always something endearing about doing something never done before.
Time to brush up on our command line skills.
There isn’t much information about MinWin besides what is highlighted in the video. I don’t see an easy way to download the ISO for this text-only Windows 11 image, nor do I think anybody would want to. More than anything, this looks like a “holy crap, it works” type of video that the developer made after seeing just how extreme of cuts were possible and still having a functioning operating system.
The video shows that multi-tasking is still possible using nano and vim.exe. However, the operating system’s speed is abysmal as it takes over 10 seconds to load the MinWin is Back image shown at the top of this article.
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While I don’t think this version of Tiny11 is worth public adoption if it really is even a version of Tiny11. The actual Tiny11 is a great tool to get a modern operating system running on devices that aren’t capable of running it.
What is Tiny11?
Tiny 11 is a lightweight version of Windows 11 designed to run on old PCs that don’t meet Windows 11’s strict system requirements. Windows 11’s install size is approximately 20GB; however, with Tiny11, running the operating system on a PC with less than 4GB of RAM is possible.
The 100MB text-only version of Windows 11, called MinWin, can run with just 1.61 GB of space for its files, and the actual OS is only 100MB. Still, unless you want to be running in a Command Line Interface or CLI and have everything you do run at the speed of a tortoise, it’s likely not worth installing on anything.
