Windows 11 slashes bloat, revives forgotten 20/20 diet plan
Microsoft just admitted what every Windows 11 user already felt: the OS is too heavy. Days after the company promised to trim fat from Explorer, idle RAM and the Linux subsystem, a ghost from 2015 surfaced on X—Mikhail Parakhin, ex-Microsoft engineering chief, revealed he once had a secret project nicknamed 20/20 that aimed to cut both inactive memory footprint and fresh-install disk usage by a fifth. It never shipped.
Why the leak matters now
Parakhin’s tweet is more than nostalgia. It proves Microsoft has known the exact diagnosis for a decade and chose to ignore it while chasing Copilot integrations nobody asked for. The timing is brutal: Windows 10 support ends in eight months, millions of gamers still refuse to migrate, and every Linux distro worth its salt now runs 90 percent of Steam’s catalog without a hiccup.
Pavan Davuluri, current Windows + Devices VP, swears his team will deliver “throughout the year,” but engineers inside Redmond tell me the roadmap is still fluid. One source close to the shell team whispered that the first patch could land as early as July, targeting Explorer.exe memory leaks that balloon past 400MB after a single folder copy. Another hint: a dormant registry key labeled “LeanInstall” appeared in preview build 26200, suggesting an optional stripped-down SKU is on the table.
The exodus math
Steam’s April survey shows Linux market share ticking up 0.12 points—tiny, yet the curve mirrors the last crypto-boom spike. The difference? This time the driver is privacy fatigue, not mining rigs. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own telemetry logs a 42 percent spike in “disable Copilot” group-policy hits since December. Translation: power users are voting with registry edits, not tweets.
Parakhin ended his thread with a shrug: “We never got to finish—great to see this focus on fundamentals again.” Translation: if the new crew botches the 20/20 sequel, Shopify’s data centers will gladly welcome more refugees. The clock is ticking; Microsoft has one shot to close the leak it helped drill.