Atlas OS: A Windows version designed for gamers | Hacker News Reader

Atlas OS: A Windows version designed for gamers

atlasos.net

86 pointsnewswasboring134 comments

This would have been cool 10 years ago, but nowadays it feels more like rearranging the chairs on a sinking ship. Windows is becoming more and more locked down, with increasing difficulty to disable the bundled bloatware. And every new update runs the risk of completely undoing all these customizations. Not to mention the MS legal team could pull the rug at any second. All this effort would be better spent on a Linux gaming distro such as SteamOS.

Why?

Windows is what most gamers use and need

I get "use", but why do gamers "need" Windows?

Graphics drivers

What about them? Just select Linux from the OS dropdown.

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Installing Nvidia linux drivers directly from their website is a very bad idea im almost all cases

DirectX for starters.

NVidia and AMD usually design their GPUs together with Microsoft, OpenGL and Vulkan then play catchup with extension spaghetti until some subset of it gets available as standard feature.

Is this totally true? Vulkan supposedly derives from AMD’s Mantle API. Yes Vulkan and OpenGL have extensions in between major releases, but is that worse?

Yes, coding against extensions means multiple code paths, hardly any different than using multiple APIs when the semantics from multiple vendors don't match 1:1.

https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php

https://opengl.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php

At least with Vulkan they learned why proprietary APIs have profiles.

DirectX isn't much better with regard to the extension spaghetti. At the very least when you see a OpenGL or Vulkan version you can be assured that w/e that version includes is supported. With DX you can have something claim DX12 support but in reality it only actually supports some variation of DX10 or 11 through the feature level nonsense.

It is such a nonsense that Khronos finally learned its value, and Vulkan now has profiles.

OpenGL has profiles as well. The Core and Compatibility profile.

Didn't know Vulkan had them too. TIL.

pretty much all peripheral software (RGB control, anything customization) is Windows-first or Windows-only

In addition to graphics libraries, a lot of anti-cheat is still windows only. Many gamers hate anti-cheat, but by popularity many top games require it.

Microsoft is likely to tie future games in to being Games Pass exclusives, as well as using Microsoft Pluton and TPM chips to use remote attestation in DRM and anti-cheat - so you can't replace your OS or bootloader and still play, etc. (like anti-jailbreak checks on phones).

Most computer games only have native first-class Windows support from the developer. OS X if youre lucky. Linux basically never (not worth it).

This can be explained in a single URL:

https://www.protondb.com/explore

This is a list of games (by default sorted by popularity) and their compatibility with Linux. Some games work great, but there are major games like PUBG and Destiny 2 that don't work at all. Some major games like Apex Legends require tweaking to work.

If you're a hardcore gamer, then you need Windows because the games need Windows.

Though this may slowly change over time since Valve put out the Steam Deck which runs Linux.

To echo a comment I made elsewhere in the thread, one thing that's worth considering is that WHAT TYPE of games you play makes a big difference.

Most single player games work well, most multiplayer games don't.

Both are very valid ways to play games, but it can give different gamers very different experiences with what's supported.

No, only if you play those specific, multiplayer only games.

You can be a hardcore gamer and not play any of those.

There are very different type of gamers out there, don't forget about us, people who play single players!

I feel like I already explained why. It goes against Microsoft's business trajectory. Most gamers don't care at all about privacy or ads. The ones who do have most likely already made the switch to Linux.

What bubble do you live in? There are a lot of games that don't work well in Linux in addition to a lot of other issues with using Linux for gaming in general.

For instance: VR on Linux is still a shit show, with only one company kinda supporting it and not doing a very good job of it at that.

That was his point

The pro-privacy, power user bubble, obviously. The one company that supports VR on Linux you're mentioning is Valve, which lets you use their headsets in any OS with no fuss. They fully support Linux, so I don't really know what you're talking about there. The Occulus line on the other hand, requires a Facebook account and tracks your data constantly. Obviously the overlap of Linux gamers and people fine with the Occulus ToS are pretty small. Conversely, the overlap of Windows users and privacy-conscious people who are knowledgeable enough to modify their OS is also very small.

Even if you accept that only some models of Vive and Index really work...

> They fully support Linux

No power management for base stations, the Index camera doesn't work, asynchronous reprojection causes issues, no automatic audio switching, and a host of other little issues.

Yup, fully supported.

It may surprise you how many people use Linux and have a Facebook account or an iPhone. You seem to have conflated a standard Linux user with a staunch privacy advocate. There did used to be a strong corrlation, but as lack of privacy becomes more normal, and young people grow up in that world, that lessens significantly.

We can't play every game. Life moves on.

The contention was that the gamers who care about privacy and ads have moved on from Windows, I am saying this is not true. Even if you care about privacy and ads you might care more about actually being able to play certain games.

The vast majority of Windows games work perfectly fine on Linux nowadays. The only major exception is anti-cheat, but even that is starting to change. Even 343 is working to bring the Halo Master Chief collection to Linux by moving to EAC’s linux offering (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/09/343-working-on-halo-th...)

With the incredible success of the Steam Deck, PC game publishers would be stupid to ignore it.

VR isn’t there yet, but VR isn’t a massive industry anyways. And besides, Valve is the PC VR company. Anyone predicting that VR is never going to work well on Linux is being foolish. As soon as Valve decides to allocate resources to Linux VR, the problem will be solved. And they have every incentive to do so, since they’re clearly all in on Linux gaming.

I do not see how literally any of this information contradicts what I am saying.

>>The vast majority of Windows games work perfectly fine on Linux nowadays.

Sorry man, this is false, most games have anti-cheat that simply won't work with linux out of the box, you may get titles a year later (early depending on sales performance) and the ones you get rarely work perfectly out of the box.

The only place the "vast majority" statement may hold is if you count the endless amounts of simplistic/indie games, and do not consider the highly rated, highest selling titles.

The steam deck surely is helping, can't argue against that, as is SteamOS in general, but we are far far away from parity between the operating systems.

I suspect you and the OP may have differing definitions of what constitutes "most games" which are flavoring your respective experiences.

My guess is you are thinking more of multiplayer gaming, where as they are thinking more about the singleplayer games.

Elden Ring, Spider-man, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Stray, etc all work great on Linux.

Single-player games don't typically need any sort of anti-cheat features, so usually work as expected easily.

Multiplayer games are a whole other issue though, and most of those (imo) do NOT work well on Linux at the moment.

Actually I play almost exclusively single player games myself, but even those games typically start with DRM protection that makes Linux difficult at times, Denuvo finally has their native support sorted without significant degradation of performance.

And as for the games you listed I would not say they work great on linux, they require tweaking, adjustments, driver updates, switching to experimental builds, etc..

I am not saying gaming isn't possible on linux, I'm saying it isn't as easy, and the results are not on par out of the box with windows. And the things you have to do getting it working are going to typically be provided by game developer support, but by community members figuring it out, and then that having to trickle out to forums and the like.

ProtonDB would typically agree, you can look at the games you listed and see that many of them require specific adjustments to get decent frame rates, avoiding lag spikes, etc...

Now, given the option of having a gaming partition that runs windows and is only used for gaming, or trying to force the games to work on linux. What do you think the majority of gamers would rather even those who are privacy minded.

I'm hoping in the next 5 years are so that this will change, and that windows looses its grip on this market, but currently I don't see many people switching their platforms over what windows is doing.

> most games have anti-cheat

This is false. Most games do not have anti-cheat systems because most games are not multiplayer games.

Most games aren't multi-player? I could only wish, hell most games that should be only single player are now multi player.

The trash that is the multi-player games add ons what has ruined tons of games and no just because of compatibility.

> Most games aren't multi-player? I could only wish

I believe so. I couldn't find statistics but going by the new releases on Steam and seeing the pre-existing releases, most games on Steam are single player games.

Like even now, you can check the games released in 2022 and see how many of them are multiplayer.

I find it hard to believe you actually know much about what you are saying. Gaming on linux is a limited, poorly performing, second class citizen experience at best. And the support when you run into an issues falls on death ears. Feel free to look at steam, filter by OS, note that when you remove windows from your selection the majority of top rate popular games all fall away.

It is far easier to limit your ad experience, and have a dedicated windows gaming machine than it is to switch to linux for gaming.

Those only count the games that have native Linux versions. Most games are also playable through the Proton compatibility layer. You can see which games on ProtonDB. For example, the Witcher 3 is listed as Windows-only on steam, yet has a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, which means it works fine on Linux out of the box. Funny enough, the Witcher 3 is also Steam Deck certified.

https://www.protondb.com/explore

Of course, you'd know all this if you've ever tried to play on Linux yourself. You know what they say about people who live in glass houses.

Sorry to ruin your attempt at a jab, but I've posted proton links in of the few responses here. It is fair to say there are far fewer games that are platinum than gold on proton.

And something working and something being supported are vastly different.

And this may come to a shock to you but many people who want to play games don't want to tweak setting to make that work on a unsupported operating system.

This isn't a case for can you do it, this is based around the vast majority of games work fine on Linux, I don't think the average gamer would include making game specific tweaks as fine.

Those are Windows games being emulated on Linux, hardly a victory.

I think you're misinterpreting. It's not Windows itself that's sinking, it's the customizability of Windows. As people who care about user control switch to other OS's, the demand for custom Windows drops. Even gamers may simply dual-boot or own two setups if they want customization or privacy — you don't need much in terms of an OS to simply start a full-screen video game.

By contrast, XP was very customizable. I used to like BBLean.

Windows ME + Litestep shell made my old K6 Athlon machine I had as a teen a lot more usable.

>Windows ME

I'm sorry to hear that

In it's time and place it wasn't so bad. Had I been a wiser 16yo I might have just asked a friend for a pirated copy of win2k.

Yes please. The Linux space needs some modernization too with a lot of applications, like Steam, segfaulting on 10-bit color, breaking at shebangs like #!/bin/bash, or some shared lib hell—and that's not even crossing the mess that is Windows-kernel-based anti-cheat systems.

>All this effort

Effort ? That repo consists of a few Windows Registry tweaks and some bundled 3rd party installers. Not exactly ground breaking engineering that could have been better deployed to improve SteamOS/Linux....

I actually feel like Windows has made massive steps forward with 11. I say this as someone who works on Windows some of the time but hasn't had to daily-drive it for a while.

The bloatware is minimal, mostly removable without adverse impacts and the UI has improved markedly. Windows 11's support for TPM root of trust is a great step forward, and the settings screens actually feel very logically laid out now.

Winget, while not anything revolutionary if you're coming from Linux or even Mac/homebrew, is decent - and fills out a big missing piece for technical users that have missed this functionality.

I don't see it as a sinking ship at all, but maybe I'm being really naive (and I mean that sincerely).

> and the UI has improved markedly

Oh fuck no it hasn't. The UI is actually what's stopping me from upgrading to Win11.

Win11 is trying to be macOS with its UI, and that's a bug, not a feature, because I fucking hate everything about macOS's UI.

I hate multiple windows from a program coalescing into a single icon on the task bar. I hate the task bar not including text from windows. I hate that I can't have a task bar on multiple monitors. And I just generally hate how flat everything looks. What I hate most of all, is that Microsoft has decided to go the Apple way and disallow you from choosing what you want it to look like. There are no options to make it look like it used to.

IMO, Windows UI peaked with Win2K. When I used Win7, I used the classic theme. I use Win10 now, and use WindowBlinds to skin it to look like Win2K.

I mean, and I’m just putting this out there, don’t you feel a little bit like at least some of that is your own preferences?

The one thing you’ve called out that I can’t refute is that the option to customise it to the win2k look has been taken away, but I imagine it gets harder to maintain the further they move from those metaphors (e.g. you already needed to use WindowBlinds on 10).

I really like the new UI. The window snapping is far better than it’s been previously. It takes quite a bit from macOS, but I think they’ve left the worst parts of macOS out like the horrific monstrosity of a settings screen and the janky mess of a permissions system.

> I mean, and I’m just putting this out there, don’t you feel a little bit like at least some of that is your own preferences?

Certainly.

The problem I have though is that one of the reasons I use Windows is because it's not Mac.

Really, the only reason I'm still on Windows is because I'm a gamer and many multiplayer games don't work in Linux because the anti-cheat software isn't compatible. But the changes in Win11 make me stick with Win10, which is a shame because the current gen of Intel CPUs use two types of cores, and the Thread Director technology isn't going to be ported to Win10, so I'm either stuck with my i9-9900K or I switch to AMD.

I get where you're coming from, and if it's primarily a gaming machine it might not be something you care about, but there's a bunch of reasons why someone might prefer Windows 11 to a Linux system (I say this adoring Linux - so none of this is intended as criticism).

On W11 you have TPM/ROT, centralised app signing (that you can enable/disable as you prefer), DirectX 12 (I realise this wouldn't matter if everything was on Vulkan, but it's not).

Proton is great, and Linux has only gotten more user-friendly over time, but there's still some touch points that are either stubbornly still not addressed or just won't be addressed because they're antithetical to FOSS (again, TPM and central signing authorities).

Side note: A central signing authority would be really helpful in the Linux world, maybe run/funded by a consortium of Linux-using orgs (Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Red Hat). I'm surprised this hasn't been attempted already as it would be protective of those organisations massive cloud investments, too.

Seth Arnold wrote about this about ten years ago, touching on the problems back in 2.4.3 that prevented this from gaining traction: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732927/signed-executabl....

It should be noted some of those weaknesses still apply to W11 and macOS even now. I would think WASM (coupled with a minimal runtime like Wasmer) might provide a means to deal with this issue by signing the packaged sandbox and everything in it rather than worry about the internals of the language and what it loads (in that it can't load/touch anything outside the sandbox boundary anyway).

UPDATE: Hadn't realised this has now been started (https://www.sigstore.dev/).

I use StartAllBack with Windows 11 and it works really well.

Windows sure does get easier to game on if you disable all the useless shit nobody needs, like the antivirus, the backup service, the accessibility features, device driver updates, the Japanese language, etc. (/s)

And then there's all the utility programs removed, like Paint 3D and Calculator and that thing that lets you view SMS on your desktop. It's not like those impact performance at all - they're just trying to reclaim every last byte of disk space.

They even disable the Xbox game overlay. I guess they just assume none of your games will be from the Microsoft store.

This is not a system designed for gaming. This is a system only suitable for gaming. It is incompatible with a great deal of Windows software (why would you disable Unix socket support?), and a great deal of non-gaming workflows, and disables most of the security measures on the system (even UAC dialogs - any program asking for admin gets it automatically). The only kind of person I can think of that wouldn't regret installing this is someone dual-booting to use Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else.

> They even disable the Xbox game overlay. I guess they just assume none of your games will be from the Microsoft store.

They have a flag to effectively disable the store and UWP apps[1] so yeah, that's a safe guess.

[1]: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/blob/a356ba84b52131d2130a6...

These people do not know what they are doing. I'll pull out a random piece I saw reading their github. They remove support for Unix domain sockets. Why bother? How is that "hurting gaming"? What if a game wants to use af_unix sockets to implement some kind of IPC? What are the odds these people know what a Unix domain socket is when they decide to remove it to performance reasons?

This is just a "break my apps" script.

Yeah, I don’t think this is a project made by someone with a formal SWE background.

One of their blog posts talks about “Process Count” in Windows task manager. Apparently there’s a whole community who are into stamping out Windows processes? Amusing.

> Throughout my time within the tweaking community I have seen an uncomfortably large amount of people who care WAY too much about their process count in Task Manager and break core functionality for a lower process count.

https://zusier.xyz/blog/posts/process-count-doesnt-matter/

Windows "distros" like these are extremely shady. You're downloading gigabytes of unverifiable binaries and Microsoft will inevitably shut it down. Just use a basic Windows install and tweak it as little as possible, your life will be so much easier and you're not going to miss out on "performance tweaks" because they don't do shit in the first place.

Yup the people who have problems with Windows are the ones who fuck their registry up with this hacky bullshit. Just leave everything alone and it works fine.

And not a single mention of what it actually _does_. No docs, nothing. It may as well be malware for all I know.

Chasing down the link to the repo and then the wiki: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/wiki/1.-FAQ#contents

The last time something similar reached the front page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434934 ), one of the key ”features” was the total removal of Windows Update.

I can’t wait for the next wormable Windows exploit with all the un-upgradeable boxes out there

> Atlas removes all types of tracking embedded within Windows and enforces hundreds of group policies to minimize data collection. Things outside the scope of Windows we cannot increase privacy for, such as websites you visit.

The great thing about proprietary software that comes with spyware is, you can never be too sure.

It also removes things related to security of the actual device and possibly network if something bad spreads.

It removes things such as: Windows Defender

It also removes "Restore Points & System Reset", so I guess that when it breaks you have to do a fresh install.

Source: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/wiki/1.-FAQ#13-whats-remov...

restore points are deprecated since 11

Good. Antivirus software that insists on running in the background is horrible and largely unnecessary.

A very significant portion of my family tech support has been about Windows Defender grinding systems to a half by keeping disk IO constantly at 100% in laptops with HDDs.

It's unnecessary for users smart enough not to get viruses. Pretty necessary for users that aren't.

It's not rocket science. My mother is pretty tech illiterate but she's never gotten any viruses after I hosed the Win Defender off her laptop. She literally just checks her mail, streams netflix and visits a handful of news websites. Lots of users are like this. They can get by fine just with an adblocker and an occasional scan to be sure. Scanning the disk constantly is just ridiculous.

> [...] she's never gotten any viruses after I hosed the Win Defender off her laptop.

How would you (or she!) know that?

I do a basic service when I visit, including a malware scan.

anecdote to the contrary:

>visits a handful of news websites

That's exactly how I got my only zero day virus in 20+ years of tech career. News sites have sources. Some news are rumors. It was very long ago and i pressed source link to 'semi accurate' tech news source in a news about CPUs.

Your best bet is to replace hdd with ssd or replace laptop and turn everything to 'recommended' or even 'security recommended'. Yes 8ms delays on some file opens will be there but people can live with that.

HN readers can delete Windows antivirus and reduce global warming. It's your civic duty.

I would bet good money that people using an xtreme tuning OS like Atlas, are more likely to get their games from the pirate bay and their hacks from honest-bobs-totally-not-virii.com

For me, Atlas was just a way of installing my gaming windows install a little faster, because I didn't have to spend hours removing or disabling all the shitware, spyware etc. I was gonna do that anyway. I think it's just as likely that people using Atlas are just Linux/Mac daily drivers who consequently have a much lower tolerance for Windows' builtin malware, and so take efforts to make the little time they spend in Windows more bearable.

Amen. People are amazed when I fire up SysInternals 'ProcMon' and show them how many hundreds of thousands of times their AV fires off in one single minute of monitoring. ()
I'll grant that kind of sustained checking is what you need to combat malware on Windows. But it damn well does have an effect on the overall system responsiveness.

() I did a q-n-d check; 1.3M events, and almost 300K were AV/Malware.

For casual users, modern implementation of Windows Defender has been pretty great. It has low overhead, doesn't tend to get in the way and does a good job of catching what is legitimately dangerous. It's not perfect, but for most people it's a great addon to common sense.

If it's grinding the system to a halt, there's something else already quite wrong.

Nothing except that the system has an HDD and not an SSD.

I've seen this numerous times with fresh Win 10 installs on hardware I had just serviced.

Just a couple of weeks ago I resolved this situation for my brother who has a fairly old desktop with a 6th gen i5 and a hard drive. The system was completely unusable because windows 10 had so much crap running in the backround polling the disk, keeping all his software waiting. Disk was completely healthy. Did a full reinstall, barely improved. Installed an SSD, and it was like new.

This recent finding in Android by Mullvad came to mind: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/10/10/android-leaks-connect...

Even if he benchmarks on the website could be trusted, I don't see how saving a little bit of memory and running processes will make any difference on a gaming computer. Memory and running processes aren't the bottleneck. Definitely not worth the trouble of running some custom third party OS modifying software.

If it would be aimed at making old computers useable for office work longer, then it might make sense but not on a computer used by gamers.

Calling a bunch of registry tweaks a pompous name like "Atlas OS" is funny.

Eh, why not? People call Ubuntu with a specific set of packages an "OS" all the time.

> Atlas aims to be secure as possible without losing performance. We do this by disabling features that can leak information or be exploited. There are exceptions to this such as Spectre, and Meltdown. These mitigations are disabled to improve performance. If a security mitigation measure decreases performance, it will be disabled.

haha, gave me a good laugh. thanks, but no thanks.

If you're using the system for gaming and not banking, this seems like a reasonable trade off.

... that is, until you connect to a malicious server that can exploit a local vulnerability. then you're screwed.

Who only uses their machine explicitely for gaming?

In there are lots of people who use Macs or Linux for everything but gaming and gaming for Windows. My son has a PC used for gaming and nothing else.

Still. Imagine the following scenario: your son's machine is compromised because of said exploits. It's in the same network as your other systems. The attacker can now sniff all traffic, attack other systems. Do you have good network segmentation in place?

Yikes, from the FAQ, these are removed:

“TPM (Trusted Platform Module), Windows Defender”

There’s some bullshit hand-waving about “security” on the GitHub landing page, but what are they expecting people to do - install Norton?

While the extra ram could be useful for some, I fail to see how the metrics they are using are relevant in any way. Having plenty of processes isn't supposed to be an issue with modern OSes and multicore CPUs and latency seems to be a non-issue they have a hard time explaining themselves.

I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Custom Windows ISOs for gaming aren't new, they just don't surface into the mainstream that often because they mostly distribute through word of mouth, these days mostly via Discord, YouTube, and Tiktok.[1] One such ISO, EVA, was made by one of the AtlasOS contributors.[2]

Though EVA raises another problem with this whole trend of ISO distributions over distributing the tweaks and install steps — it's trivial for a malicious actor to impersonate any of them and distribute a build full of exploits:

> The custom ISO from the previous project is discontinued so please do not ask for it as it has been recreated with malware.

The social, and typically decentralized, nature of the distribution means the only way to know a legit build is to already be inside the community distributing them. If you're not in the community and get hacked, nobody cares anyway.

That's why I'm surprised AtlasOS has such a big presence, and uses GitHub to host their ISOs - they're kind of asking Microsoft to hit them, maybe in hopes of raising their profile.

[1]: Several channels offer roundups and reviews of different ISOs with links buried in video descriptions or subtitles, such as https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSyKK_dtmNzCyp0O8TLVHAQ

[2]: https://github.com/amitxv/EVA

Hi, EVA is now a guide to create and tailor a Windows image to the user's needs, similar to Chris Titus Tech's tutorials except it is not a prebuilt ISO being distributed. I use built-in tools such as DISM to modify the image which is what other popular tools such as NTLite use.

I recommend getting a Windows 10 Pro ISO and running the Spiceworks Decrapifier (https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4378-windows-1...), this works very well and creates a much cleaner installation that can still run Xbox games and install apps from the store.

This looks much more like what I would want. Thanks.

It's very sad for microsoft that the community has to step up to unbloat their stuff

Trillion dollar company can't be bothered to optimize their OS properly, or perhaps their workforce is not skilled enough

They are already missing out on the handheld console market, it's all about linux/android

I'm personally happy about it, the worse microsoft becomes, the better the competition becomes because it helps new actors emerge and proliferate (macOS, android, linux)

Windows already sells this as Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC - all the crapware, telemetry, and other bloat is stripped out leaving just the bare OS for installation in kiosks, industrial equipment, digital signage, point-of-sale systems, etc. It's designed to get minimally disruptive security updates, and defers feature updates as long as possible.

It's not that the trillion dollar company can't be bothered to optimize the OS, it's that each division within the company needs to justify their own existence, and if they can sell a Candy Crush promotion in the start menu at the cost of some customer goodwill, that might be an ephemeral, unmeasurable $10M loss to Microsoft as a whole but a $1M profit, clearly described by a graph going up and to the right, and a promotion....for the middle manager who foisted Candy Crush on all of us.

The problem is that LSTC is not available through retail channels. If you're interested in this because your startup wants to sell a Windows-based hardware product, buy a prebuilt system from OnLogic or similar.

Sounds like the same excuses i keep hear for over a decade already, i don't buy it, and i'll even say it's bullshit

Apple had time to properly transition from PPC to Intel to ARM with their own chip, develop new experiences from Smartphone to Tablets to SmartWatch, Microsoft failed at all of them, including SERVERS!!, something they took for granted for decades

So no, you can't just say "they have LSTC wich is a non bloated windows", no, the tech remains the same, the problems remains the same, they even lost the embedded market... c'mon

Windows is being operated as if it was a students weekend school project, but he prefer to go play outside with his friends instead, friends that are now grow up adults with a beautiful house, smart kids and beautiful wife, microsoft is stuck with that hooker that try to sell him some qualcomm drugs

That isn't true, the only version of "ltsc" without the crap was ltsb 2016, after that it's closer to retail (or standard enterprise which has all of the same shit) and with the most recent version it's basically pro with a different name, presumably because people were using it for this when they aren't licensed to and the devices ltsc is designed for are likely older and/or have vendor supported drivers etc that don't require new versions and frameworks.

Unfortunately unless you have old hardware (on which win7 would be fine) then you can't run older ltsc/b anymore as they don't support dch etc.

Case in point: my Ryzen laptop requires new uwp for the realtek audio because apparently signalling input change on headset detection is hard, it won't detect headset and the only way to change from headphones to headset is in the uwp app, which is quite ridiculous but that's the windows world we live in now.

Also many of the "tweaks" mentioned in that repo are likely to break service imaging so if you do update, you'll end up in a perpetual updating/rolling back cycle.

> Trillion dollar company can't be bothered to optimize their OS properly, or perhaps their workforce is not skilled enough

That’s what happens when you’re immune to typical market forces. Why invest money in things that give value to consumers when you can just exploit them? It’s not like the government is going to protect them, and the decades of anticompetitive behavior you’ve managed to get away with means that you don’t have any real competition left to worry about.

This is why it's essential to break monopolies. We end up getting the sort end of the stick without even realizing.

It seems that it modifies a Windows install by removing a lot of stuff.

1. Is it legal?

2. How did they get the source code for Windows?

3. How do they handle games that require newer DirectX versions?

4. What are the actual gaming performance improvements, if any?

It doesn’t appear to actually be a compiled OS, more just a pre configured image for Win10

It's fascinating watching the difference in concern with legality expressed over this versus z-library.

The fact that there are no benchmarks on the official website beside the ridiculous claims about process count and "process latency" (whatever that means, they don't seem to know either) tells you everything you need to know.

I'd stay far away.

If it's legal and Microsoft is ok with it, I guess I'm happy it exists!

When I was a kid I remember poring over all kinds of stuff to make my games run well on the family PC. CCleaner, Disk Cleaner, Disk Defragmenter, turning off a bunch of Windows services and processes in Task Manager, and... there was one other questionable program I can't recall, that disabled a bunch of things when you ran it, then re-enabled it when you quit. I had Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware, and tweaked the registry a bit, IIRC.

My point is, it takes a lot of work to understand what can be turned off to squeeze out performance, but it sounds like something that benefits the user.

It's legal because it's a registry file and a few installers plus a desktop background. The performance gains are chiefly found by disabling important stuff like Defender.

The tweaks might be legal, but the modified Windows installation ISOs they're distributing VIA GITHUB probably aren't.[1][2]

[1]: https://atlasos.net/downloads

[2]: The download URLs are GitHub release assets distributed via https://objects.githubusercontent.com/

At a first glance it looks nice (the number of default processes reminds me of XP days...), but as always with this kind of project... is this legal, or will they get a DMCA complaint soon or later?

I am not a member of the team or anything. I found this on tiktok. But it is open source so I checked the github repo. They do not distribute a pre-activated image, all images need to be activated using a windows key. So in that sense all they are really distributing is a configuration of windows, that is also mostly what their github repo[1] is. But I see the issue there too as I don't think even sharing unactivated windows is allowed. But worst comes to worst, they can prepare instructions on how to install their stuff with an image downloaded from microsoft website. They are not writing a new windows, its more like they are figuring out what bloat is there in windows and removing it.

Edit: They actually already have instructions on how to use their scripts with a windows image downloaded from microsoft website [2]

[1] https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas

[2] https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/blob/main/src/README.md

There's a breakdown on the legality of redistributing modified Windows ISOs by NTLite staff on their forum.[1] The Atlas team uses NTLite. Relevant bits:

> You're permitted to only use official images provided by MSFT or authorized partners (VAR or reseller). You're not permitted to use a random image found on the Internet to start your customization (even with a valid license key).

> You're not permitted to share copies of the original media, or any customized images you make. You can deploy images on behalf of another party who already owns a correct license for their own internal use.

> Bottom line: You're allowed to modify a clean image if you own a license. You can't redistribute it, but you can share NTLite presets, scripts or instructions that allow other licensed users to perform the same work. Everyone must have their own OEM, retail or volume licenses.

EDIT: They appear to be claiming "educational use"/EU 2009/24 protection, which, well. Good luck.[2]

[1]: https://www.ntlite.com/community/index.php?threads/is-it-leg...

[2]: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/wiki/Legal

https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas:

Disclaimer

By downloading, modifying, or utilizing any of these images, you agree to Microsoft's Terms (<https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/U...>). None of these images are pre-activated, you must use a genuine key.

⇒ it may avoid legal issues, but I wouldn’t guarantee that (are third parties allowed to even distribute the unmodified Windows ISO?

I seem to recall someone else getting in trouble for distributing Windows ISOs in the past. MS tends to get very touchy on that ostensibly for security reasons (which I actually get). They seem tend to look askance at scripts that strip down the OS but don't seem to otherwise care other than to tell people they won't get support while using said things.

In the past many people were distributing binaries from Windows without Microsoft being very touchy.

You can check:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BartPE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLite_and_vLite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinBuilder

You can also find customized failed build of Windows like Neptune, Chicago, Whistler, Longhorn etc. ISOs.

One example:

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44187

I guess Microsoft thinks that ultimately, it gets people acquainted with Windows and even loving it.

Hello, I'm the developer of Winbuilder. Those builder projects exist specifically because they avoid distribuing ANY Microsoft binaries.

You have to provide the installation files or ISO. The files are then extracted from there and used for building a new image.

That is the reason why these hobby and sysadmin projects were able to exist for so long without legal issues from Microsoft. Distributing ISO images with Microsoft files like beta archive and now AtlasOS goes against the EULA conditions (assuming they are valid in your host country).

Hello, I admire your various works and contributions,

Merci!

Might be thinking of Ninjutsu OS, which got a DMCA takedown in 2020 for distributing modified Windows installation ISOs "that heavily modify Windows 10 with a huge number of tweaks, mods and extra tools" for pentesting:

https://torrentfreak.com/removing-annoying-windows-10-featur...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486887

Complaint text: https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/e6911fbf79c67c6f9e834c...

I think I saw that one; but the one that comes to mind is also:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/04/27/how-microsoft-convinced-...

Reminds me of the meme going around emulation forums 20 years ago about making a gaming distro that would be miraculously faster.

Snake oil

I used to do this all the time in XP days. I think I'll give it a shot on my gaming PC

but who are they and why should I trust them to not have compromised the OS?

I don't know, but you can build the image yourself: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/tree/main/src

Well, I mean they removed most of the security features of Windows. I think they arguably tell you on GitHub they compromised the OS...

For anyone not interested in installing foreign OS, I like to use Chris Titus' tweaks. https://christitus.com/windows-tool/

What's fun is if you actually dig into the Atlas repo, it's primarily a pile of NTLite tweaks[1] plus a batch file that automatically applies a bunch of CTT tweaks, particularly the ones around updates and UWP that he explicitly doesn't recommend.[2]

Anyway, Titus also has a guide on making a "custom Windows ISO" using NTLite.[3]

[1]: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/blob/main/src/Atlas_20H2.x...

[2]: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/blob/main/src/AtlasModules...

[3]: https://christitus.com/ntlite-guide/

How easy is it to enable/disable specific features for the final image? By default a lot of useful (for me at least) functionality seems to be removed.

When I was young, I played Counter Strike pretty competitive and getting the most fps out of my system was really important. I always thought there would be a gaming ready OS. Not sure why it took so long.

I always kept optimising my Windows.. disable auto updates, disable heartbleed, disable indexing, etc. I tried to find the source of every microstutter or fps drop.

I am not sure when the shift happened, but it seems gamers don't value performance anymore like they did in the zero's and nineties.

I actually love this build and will try it out. Even if it only gives me 4 fps more, it's a win.

I think the large majority of gamers are GPU bound these days, and I'm suspicious that there's much you can tweak in the OS that improves GPU performance. Maybe I'm wrong and improving system latency helps.

I feel like GPU frames cost like 3x CPU frames these days.

This is the answer.

It's obvious when you play games on a laptop with integrated graphics. You can tweak every in-game setting to the bare minimum and/or try to stop every service that's running outside of the game, and none of it makes a significant difference, because the core bottleneck is that there isn't a dedicated GPU.

The other big bottleneck that existed 10+ years ago is that people still used spinning hard disks. Now we almost all have SSDs, a big chunk of load time and source of slowdowns due to background processes is gone.

> disable heartbleed

what

They would be meaning Heartbleed mitigations. Lotta folks do this on Linux too depending on their threat model just to compile the kernel faster or whatever.

They care even more, they just use less snake oil these days, as the experimentation is much more precise than before.

The main focus for today's competitive players is not throughput, but motion-to-photon latency and its consistency (consistent frame times, constant input lag). Both improved greatly in recent years from thoughtful tweaks such as limiting your FPS to avoid GPU queue congestions, and due to software developers finally paying attention (NVidia and AMD introduced several low-latency tricks into their drivers, Microsoft also did lots of scheduling-related work). Hardware also got substantially better with latency.

The „Tiny“ versions from NTDEV are very popular. From Tiny7 to Tiny10 everything is available.

Wait, windows has other uses?

I guess Excel isn't technically a game.

It runs DOOM though.

https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw

This is a great idea. How are you funding it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com