It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.
and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited
That's a half-truth at best; I can just open the disk image in a hex editor if nothing else understands the format.
Hackintoshers have figured out how to add/modify drivers etc. It's certainly not without obstacles, but that's still very far from "impossible". If I remember correctly, you need to re-snapshot the FS and tell the bootloader to boot from it.
(And necessarily, ignoring the countless cries of "it can't be done" was how I was able to accomplish my goal... I knew that it was possible since I could edit any bit of the FS; figuring out which files I could remove and patch was the hard and undocumented part.)
This is one of those things where you have to ask yourself "how do you get it so wrong?". I get the idea of protecting from malware/self-harm, but to not allow removal of such a pointless app is just befuddling. At least Microsoft trying to say that Explorer was core to the OS, but a chess app? I never did buy into Explorer being core until the day I accidentally pasted an URL into File Explorer's path and it rendered the webpage. I don't understand why someone thought that was necessary to allow to happen, but there it was, core to the OS.
I think it’s because all those apps use core technologies so their bundle size is tiny. You hide them and never think about them (like the old windows media player). Most of windows optional features are very much in your face all the time.
please explain how a chess game is core technology
Not that the are core technologies, more like they use whatever default libraries (Frameworks in Apple parlance) that are already there. Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)
Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)
Trivial to remove (just delete the files), but also very little in the way of savings --- less than 1MB each.
The sealing of the filesystem can be disabled trivially, though, via a command line tool that Apple ships with MacOS that you run from recovery mode.
And then you can remount `/` as read-write, and create a new blessed snapshot with your changes made to it.
This doesn't actually delete the signed snapshot though, so the space consumed by `/System/Applications/Chess` still is consumed. I'm not sure if MacOS will allow deleting the final sealed snapshot for `/`. It might, I don't know that anyone is clamoring for it though.
I don't have my detailed notes from when I did this, but I believe you should be able to copy everything you want to keep to a new filesystem.