While many like how Windows 11 looks or feels, there are some who just want to cut out on what they feel is bloat as their hardware may not be good enough to run the new OS smoothly, or simply for the fun of it. Recently, a popular third-party Windows 11 tweaking and customization app called ThisIsWin11 (TIW11) evolved into Debloos or Debloat OS, which, as the name suggests, allows the de-bloating of the operating system.
If one isn"t comfortable going about tweaking things themselves with it, they could also opt for Tiny11, which was released earlier today. This stripped-down Windows 11 Pro 22H2 mod requires 8GB of install space, 2GB of system memory, and perhaps the best part, it does not require TPM and Secure Boot.
However, there are of course caveats to this and as one would expect, security can be the biggest dealbreaker for many people, perhaps even bigger than saving memory and storage. The developer of Tiny11, NTDev, assured that despite the strip down, the mod is still pretty secure. They have also explained how they managed to package it inside 8Gigs of space.
On a Twitter thread, NTDev has addressed several questions or concerns that people have:
After reading some comments about tiny11, here are a few remarks that I want to make:
1. Tiny11 is not serviceable, but .NET, drivers and security definiton updates can still be installed from Windows Update.
2. While I can understand that installing modified versions of Windows can pose a security risk, I can assure you (and you can obviously check for yourself) that the image doesn"t have anything from external sources added to it.
3. The main way that tiny11 gets its small size is by the removal of Windows Component Store (WinSxS). As such, the installation of new features or languages is unfortunately not possible.
4. At it"s core, tiny11 is designed to bring new life to old computers, so I don"t encourage installing it on PCs that support Windows 11 by default. This doesn"t mean that I don"t trust my product, but at one point the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.
5. This shouldn"t be considered a "Windows without telemetry/spyware" image, but one that was designed to run on PCs that don"t support the standard versions of Windows 11, in the same line that tiny10 did with Windows 10.
You can have a detailed look at what Tiny11 offers in this article.