Atlas is a Windows version designed for gamers. Atlas users can enjoy higher framerate, lowered input delay & latency. Great for people on a low-end system, or high-end gaming machine.
I had no idea people still did this – create custom versions of Windows ISOs and try to pawn them off as something special. The legality of this is more than dubious, of course, and you can probably achieve the same results with some of the countless scripts that are out there that also remove services, telemetry and pointless applications.
MS supporting custom Windows distros would be a good idea for MS. They could charge projects for the tools, hosting, distribution, and lots of extra for the support. It would be like Docker Hub. At one point they already had lots of little tools to accomplish this, but there were only for business usage. MS needs to merge this into GitHub, or buy Docker.
We get the drama around people trying all the distros. I mean, nothing bad is going to happen. Promise. 🙂
This one I actually for once agree with Thom, this makes ZERO sense and not only that if they are using the Windows version scheme then that means this ISO is 2 years out of date as Windows 10 is on 22H2 and this appears to be 20H2.
Why you wouldn’t just use Nlite or Windows 10 Debloater and trust some third party to ALL of your data (remember this is the OS we are talking about here so if they were to put in a backdoor your PC is their PC) is beyond me, especially with Win 10 which frankly is insanely easy to just run a simple script or even just remove the apps you don’t want via control panel. This leaves me scratching my head.
It’s easy to be dismissive, but the scientific part of me is curious to see what independent A/B benchmark comparisons would show. Their claims of memory and latency improvements, if true, are laudable, but does it have any impact on gaming? Of course it’s true that everything they optimized could be done without their installer, but the one and done approach could be appealing for those who don’t want to spend hours tweaking.
I’d be inclined to let benchmarks determine the merits of this project. Unfortunately though I don’t have any spare windows computers to test this myself. Also, things like the lack of updates can be a pro and a con.
The question isn’t “will it be faster?” which if you rip a chunk out of any OS then the ripped one will be faster, but the question is “Do you trust these random people to have access to your network and/or data?” because short of an audit I don’t see any way to be sure there isn’t anything hinky with the image. At best we are talking about a version of Windows missing 2 years’ worth of security patches which you won’t be able to apply and at worst possibly rootkitted or backdoored.
Its frankly just as simple if not more so to just run the Windows 10 debloater Powershell script off Github and since it is just a Powershell script you can open it up, see what its doing, and if there are parts you want to keep just comment out those lines.
bassbeast,
I know that’s meant to be a rhetorical question and I agree with you about potential risks, but that’s what you get when you install windows software on a normal day. The risk of malware isn’t unique to this project, it could be in almost any software: games, drivers, utilities, dll files, registry files, scripts, and so on. At least this project provides sources that you can check/change yourself. As a developer you’d have an advantage doing so, but even with source ordinary users don’t realistically have the qualifications to determine whether something is malicious or not. They are forced to rely on project reputation for everything they install and are programmed to click “yes” on security prompts because legitimate software makes them accustomed to doing that.
So while it’s true there are risks, I don’t necessarily think the risks are greater than gamers running random games. Users will generally have to rely on AV products to detect malware. To this last point, removing windows AV would seem to expose the user to a bigger risk than leaving it in, although it does come with a high performance cost – you can’t have everything. In the end, everyone is free to do as they wish 🙂
Most such compilations disable criticial Windows services left and run, including Windows Update, which leaves you vulnerable.
Oh, and their disable built-in mitigations against Meltdown and Spectre, nice, https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas
Artem S. Tashkinov,
This isn’t likely to be a problem for the target gaming audience with all software under the same user account. Any malicious software would instantly compromise the user regardless of spectre/meltdown. For spectre/meltdown exploits to be “beneficial” to an attacker, they need the ability to run untrusted code and the capability of consistently triggering target code in remote processes such that statistical analysis leaks bits of information.
If the conditions are right, this can be a problem for multi-user servers, but it’s unlikely to be a problem for a computer with one account dedicated to gaming. I don’t think it’s a big deal for Atlas to do this since they’ve openly disclosed that they’re disabling the mitigations. Go ahead and use it for gaming, but don’t use it to provide multiuser services.
Yeah, “mitigations=off” on linux is essential on older Intel desktops to keep the performance as it was.
There already is AME ( https://ameliorated.info/ ), which is a pleasant experience for a VM doing some random quick things in windows if really needed. choco preinstalled for updating apps.
I find this so strange. Someone takes a base windows image and makes changes (in the open with code open sourced) and the response is “how can they be trusted” yet this is the exact model that Linux works under. Take a base, make some changes, voila, it’s a new distro. As trusted as the last.
Installing someone’s custom wim, what could go wrong?