When do you consider a system to be bloated?

I often hear folks in the Linux community discussing their preference for Arch (and Linux in general) because they can install only the packages they want or need - no bloat.

I’ve come across users with a couple of hundred packages installed (likely fresh installs), but I’ve also seen others with thousands.

Personally, I’m currently at 1.7k packages on my desktop and 1.3k on my laptop (both running EndeavourOS). There might be a few packages I could remove, but I don’t feel like my system is bloated.

I guess it’s subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?

I’m asking as a relatively new Linux user - been daily driving for about 7/8 months

nous,

A system us bloated when I feel it is bloated. It is highly subjective and there is no real line to cross. It is just more of a sliding scale, at one end there is no code on your system that you never use and at the other there is nothing on it that you ever want to use.

The former can likely on be reached on small microcontrollers where you have written everything exactly how you want it, and you would never even consider using the latter.

Realistically every system has things younever use, even the kernel has modules you will never load. And every non tiny program has features you never use. All of that is technically bloat but each instance I don’t think makes your system or even an application feel bloated.

So really the question is when does the bloat bother you or get in your way. If you are trying to install an OS on a tiny embedded device where space is a premiumthenn you are going to draw that line at a different point to on the latest desktop with multi terabytes of storages and oodles of ram.

Anyone that claims there system has no bloat is technically lying to themselves. But if it makes them happy who cares? If your system has every package installed and it does not bother you at all thenitt does not matter at all.

TechNerdWizard42,

If it affects system performance and gives me no noticeable benefit. Otherwise, flash bytes are cheap. I’ve got 30TB+ in my laptop. Why do I care if I have a 3GB OS or a 2.95GB OS?

SuperSpruce,

30TB? You’re in the 0.0001% for laptop storage. I have more than 98% of people and I have 3TB.

Not everyone is this fortunate. Some people have cheapo laptops with 32GB eMMC. Now, 3GB vs 2.95GB is still negligible, but 4GB vs 5GB is definitely not negligible.

TechNerdWizard42,

Even the shit laptops come with 256GB nowadays. Saving less than 0.5% of storage on OS optimizations that reduce usability is a poor tradeoff.

Heck even my phone has 1TB… Flash bytes are cheap. If you have a 32GB soldered down chip, buy a flash drive for the price of a BjgMac and voila you’ve 4x’d your storage.

SuperSpruce, (edited )

People don’t have brand new laptops all the time. Often, they have crappy 10 year old laptops because they can’t afford anything better, especially in poorer parts of the world.

In MicroSD cards flash is cheap. But unfortunately, most phones don’t come with MicroSD slots anymore, and instead they come with huge storage markups. According to Apple, which controls a big section of the market, a Big Mac gets you a whopping 5GB of storage, that’s if you buy today. But with a 5 year old phone, a Big Mac back then would get you 1GB of storage that you use today. And in many countries, most people make less than a Big Mac per day.

potentiallynotfelix,

If it has the following: -graphical file manager -graphical app store -“start menu” of some sort -graphical centralized settings app I use i3wm on gentoo or arch

governorkeagan,

I would love to get to the point where I’m as comfortable moving around my files in the terminal as I an in a gui.

potentiallynotfelix,

It’s really not that hard you just need to start doing it and you’ll get used to it any time

Pika,

I concider bloat to be either unneeded files/programs. So duplicated libraries, unused apps, not personal data files that are stagnant, anything similar to that. It’s hard to put a metric on it, I just browse through my files every once and awhile and delete the unused stuff, but with the push for container based stuff I forsee that method will become increasingly harder as time goes on

LeFantome,

I just installed Red Hat 5.2 a couple of days ago ( true story ). It is so light-weight with its Fvwm window manager, bash 1.2, and GCC 2.7.2. It even had Netscape Navigator! Who could ask for more? Anything more is bloat!

Just kidding. Bloat is installing things you do not use or that do not make your system better. I think some desktop environments add bloat. Mostly though, even the heavy ones represent a smaller fraction of system resources than their ancestors did on older systems.

If you have 3000 packages you use, who cares? However, if you have 3000 packages and only use a dozen of them, maybe your system is bloated.

I use a lot of older hardware. So, I like a fairly lean base system. I still use a lot of software though. I don’t think that is bloat.

Sims, (edited )

I think there are several factors influencing when someone feel ‘bloat’. There’s the ‘purists’ that tend to optimize their system to be as ‘lean & mean’ as possible - relentlessly, and there’s the simplists that just want a simple setup/dashbord they can control - without too many options/distractions from info-bloat. Info-bloat hints to different types of bloat: filesize, dependencies, gfx details/animations, option-bloat, monetization-bloat and so on. There may also be cultural tendencies within different distro communities gentoo, tendencies from those with the emacs syndrome, or other more political groupings…

The last factor I can imagine atmo is that the level of hardware is very important and low end operators will tend to see more bloat when things run slowly - no matter their ‘bloat focus’.

I had some Pythoncode for you but couldnt get the codeblock to play along 🙃

fruitycoder,

When it affects stability, functionality, or exceeds my abilty to secure it properly.

KISSmyOSFeddit,

I don’t even care anymore. I’ve got a system with 1TB of SSD space and 16GB of RAM that I mostly use to open a browser.
Install all the desktop environments for all I care.

yuri,

To me bloat is anything using resources when I didn’t ask it to. Someday I’ll have more than 16 gigs of ram to throw around, maybe then I won’t be such a memory miser. One of the biggest things that pushed me into linux was the myriad of live service-esque background processes windows was forcing on me.

If I was a little less dyslexic I’d have a CLI for everything, now THAT’S efficiency!

cafuneandchill,

when it eated too much

yuri,

too much libsodium

Nindelofocho,

I think it depends on the packages themselves. Do you have a lot of packages with overlapping functionality or are they packages that specifically focus on one function. I think its bloat when your file compression package also controls your rgb lights. Not all overlap is bad but too much is. Im a bit of a noob with linux though so grain of salt and all that

furycd001,
@furycd001@lemmy.ml avatar

Personally, I consider a “bloated system” to be one that has a bunch of installed apps that I’ll never use…

otp,

The worst is when they can’t even be uninstalled.

furycd001,
@furycd001@lemmy.ml avatar

Anxiety at its finest !!

nous,

So, basically every system then?

furycd001,
@furycd001@lemmy.ml avatar

Not every system, no…

corsicanguppy,

Systemd continues to consume system functions with - bad - facsimiles, and for things like the /bin-/usr/bin decree they just don’t actually get it.

I consider any system running systemd to be bloated and I stop caring about PACKAGE COUNT after that.

kawa,
@kawa@reddeet.com avatar

When there’s ads in my terminal

GustavoM,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

“Bloat” implies “excess”, “overloaded” – anything that has been installed and used without my consent or a badly optimized package/command.

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