My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.
More depth: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8
Its a royal pain in the ass for 120GB ssd installs or smaller.
People put etc in git even: https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/
The registry is much more magical and it is difficult to find and remove cruft, so I suppose there's an argument against it.
Hmm, I've never done this. In terms of config files, are there never any breaking changes between versions? Like ..is a v1.0 config file always guaranteed to work with v2.0 and vice versa? I guess and a related question - what is the best way to determine if an /etc/ config file isn't required?
It gets more exciting the further you drift - e.g. if you're going to Debian buster, or something more significantly different like Fedora/RH, you'd probably want to cherrypick config changes from /etc, though /home should be fine(tm).
you start culling packages with apt purge, that should remove config files too, and see what breaks, if nothing, well, try to push your luck further.
also with dpkg -S /etc/some/file you can see which file belongs to which package and target that package
usually on a server you know what you don't need. it's a bit more trial and error on a desktop. (because those can break in a lot more fun, unexpected ways, harder to know what is needed)
Imagine the use case in reality. You accidentally rm -rf your /etc folder but you still have the git tree. /etc itself is gone, entirely. Most of your tools will seize working almost immediately, the only chances you have are having a terminal already open to a root shell. Your Virtual TTYs on other screens won't work (login uses /etc/passwd, which is gone) as well as any sudo command.
Recovery from the life system is likely impossible unless you have a root shell open and git doesn't refuse to work (it might since it checks for /etc/gitconfig, if you made any critical settings here, git stops working). Live recovery also has other issue; some apps might still be writing to or reading from /etc. They might have an open handle. Recovery will result in some processes of the same binary running with different configurations. That will be a joy to discover once it inevitably starts to corrupt the system stability.
So your only way of meaningful recovery is a live system on a USB stick. Do you have one ready to use right now? Like, not prepared in a shelf somewhere but right now is there a live linux system within your reach? If not, it's rather likely it will take a while to find it.
Once you've done that, you can bootup your computer, unlock any encrypted disks you use and install git into the live system. Then you hopefully remember how to recover a git repo using it's tree only, if not, hopefully the live disk's network works.
If recovery succeeds over git, you can reboot and pray the last checkpoint in git isn't too old. Have you changed the LUKS keys in the meantime and did you forget to checkin crypttab? Or did you change your Xorg Conf because X stopped working?
The short answer is; it might be easier and just as complex to simply reinstall the system while backing up your home folder.
I wasn't even able to install Windows 7 a few months ago due to the WinSxS folder continuously bloating to fill the disk (stock on a T440p - super weird issues). It's almost as if they broke new-install update cycles on Win7 on purpose =/
My question is why the hell would they turn off a feature like this in the first place?! What is the actual "money making" motivation behind the decision?
I don't think the Windows folder is a particular good indication of Windows space usage.
A while ago Microsoft put a tablet killer design out there: 11 Screen, 4GB RAM, Touch Screen and 32GB SSD. Man+dog shipped them. Then man+dog found the machines died because Windows ran out of disk space on patch Tuesday. So regardless of what is in the windows directory 32GB is not enough to run Windows.
We "fixed" the problem by replacing Windows with Linux. Total size of Linux install, which included Libre Office and a selection of browsers: less than 4GB.
Microsoft attempting to fix the size issue by removing 100M of backups when the scale of the problem they are trying to solve is 4GB vs 32GB is a almost laughable.
[0] https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iedhs1/sln310147/...
The problem is that MS (and the mainstream linux DE's) aren't willing to admit that some of the "modernization" they have done over the last decade has done nothing but increase the visual lag while massively increasing the resource consumption for what is frequently little more than transparent windows (cause high DPI is still not quite there in both cases...).
My KDE is running in < 600MB right now. It's Chrome, Spotify and Slack that are eating memory.
Also, at least in KDE you can set animation speed to instant and get immediate feedback.
It's super stable, usable and polished.
The reason you probably are assuming Win 10 is unusable is that on your 8 or 16GB machine Windows uses free RAM to speed things up. It's is smart enough to not do this on memory constraints setups.
Funny thing is Linux users often made this same mistake with "free -m", hence the need for this site: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
The machine became a Debian machine. It was "bricked" only to the extent that there was no way forward from the failed update to getting Windows back.
50MB here, 100MB there ... pretty soon you're talking real storage usage.
Because there should be.
It's crazy that everything still wants to put stuff on C:\ ... I'm looking at you Visual Studio and Win SDK.
Plus Users\Public shared goodies. And the %userprofile%\AppData. I get that every application thinks it needs to put its cache/files there, but then why can't folks relocate users' homes? :/
I'd love if that team would also take a look at Android, where you simply can't not install on the "system drive" aka. main phone flash.
Doesn't hurt that it helps speed up the upgrade cycle since users run out of on-board space sooner.
In how many places does Windows concentrate the settings for everything?
Makes sense to get rid of one of those, especially as restoring a registry backup can lead to unintended issues if you've installed something since, whereas a system restore point takes care of all of that for you.
Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase
Is this a recommendation/suggestion of yours, or a default state?
The original windows installation media could be used to restore the system if something went horribly wrong anyway. Why the need to keep every previously used version of every dll?
There was an Insider blog post somewhat recently about Windows 10 trying to repack things into installation media over time, when it's a recovery image on the local machine. It sounds like they are working to better the situation.
https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-Multi-language/blob/maste...
I had to powershell candycrush off the drive for god's sake.