It's not about disk space, it's about what all that data is doing. Quite a lot of it is what we would traditionally call malware. Or shovelware if you want to be generous.

Given Microsoft's recent history, it would be reasonable to assume that most of that bloat is full of software that is actively aiming to harm you, scam you, or spy on you. More than disk space, it burns CPU cycles and bandwidth that you are paying for.

Whether disk space is cheap or expensive is beside the point. I still don't want to waste it. Water is cheap, but if I saw someone pouring water down the drain for no reason I would still think it's foolish and wasteful.

For my use case, I have an underpowered Linux computer and some proprietary hardware and software that only works on Windows. It works in a virtual machine with qemu, but could definitely run smoother.

I guess this would also be good for things like ci/CD pipelines, testing, etc

Windows "distros" can only be hacks, not projects, and they can't support security. Hell, it's highly likely many of them will "debloat" off most of Windows's security features by default.

The story is confusing in that they don't link to the actual project, which you can only get to by visiting the Github link, then going to the developer's projects page, then finding nano11.

I'm not sure, but I think nano11 is even more aggressive than tiny11builder's "tiny11coremaker.ps1":

https://github.com/ntdevlabs/nano11

  "The resulting OS is not serviceable. This means you cannot add languages, drivers, or features, and you will not receive Windows Updates. It is intended only for testing, development, or embedded use in VMs where a minimal, static environment is required."

"of course"?

From the article:

"The resulting OS is not serviceable. This means you cannot add languages, drivers, or features, and you will not receive Windows Updates. It is intended only for testing, development, or embedded use in VMs where a minimal, static environment is required."

Depends what you mean by "just running". If I had to run a non-VM'd windows, I'd opt for a mostly-full version (10 IOT LTSC or 11 LTSC)

Last time I clean-installed Windows 10 32-bit, then manually uninstalled the things I didn't need (which is alot) and takes a little while, then converted to Compact Mode using Admin CMD, it came out less than 5GB on the C: volume.

That's Windows alone without installing anything else. Also with System Restore off, plus disk swap & hibernation disabled.

Nothing heroic like removing Edge, but Edge was definitely not updated nor was the OS online yet. I would expect bringing that image up to date now would more than double it.

Going further when you manually disable features and background services you know you don't need, it goes down below 1GB in memory too, and you can easily browse places like HN on a PC having only 2GB memory and no disk swap enabled.

Watch your step with such low memory though, you can't browse just anywhere and it gets a lot easier to step on all the proliferating newly placed "land-mines" if you're not careful :\

You can through Parallels. Download Windows 11 ISO, install it in Parallels, provide file access to the ISO, run the script, copy the tinyISO somewhere, delete your Parallels VM then create a new VM with the tinyISO.

NTDEV has helped many with his efforts of creating tiny versions of Windows. This is the case for other solo developers/maintainers of useful programs. Unfortunately big companies don’t seem to care, imagine what would happen if all these talented people got some funding from big corporations.