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
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I find it bloated if the system have things I don’t need are noticeably using up RAM and CPU. I couldn’t care less about extra unused packages on disk, they’re dormant. I don’t care about a few daemons or resident apps I don’t use either if they’re idle all the time and use minimal RAM. Bloat for me is something that noticeably affects my running system.
I would probably add (as a couple of others have already mentioned) if it slows down the update process by pulling loads of software/dependencies that I’m not using.
Who sits and watches the update process?
Me, occasionally. I like seeing the little Pac-Man eat away at progress of a download on EndeavourOS.
Also, this video covers it slightly.
Oh god, the “your computer slows down over time” BS from people who have no idea what they are talking about so “fuck it - just nuke and reinstall”.
Remove repos you aren’t using. Uninstall / purge things you don’t want anymore. If you don’t know how to fix it then you’ll just re-do everything that made it “slow” again.
Maybe not watching it per se, but it’s nice to catch a problem before I reboot (ie a grub upgrade failure for example)
People that live in a place where 4 mbps speeds are a norm.
People that live in a place where 4 mbps speeds are a norm.
Why? That’s an even worse place to sit and watch your updates.
apt update && apt upgrade -ythen do something else while it runs and check in later.
Gentoo user here. I look at system load while compiling. (: But most of the time I can use my PC while portage is doing it’s job.
I mean, for Gentoo users an update is a bit like “track day”. So I can understand that. 😀
Who watches the watcher?
I completely agree. This is also why I find find teams and discord to be especially frustrating; they’re slow out of the box on the literal best possible hardware.
Yup. Fretting over a light daemon while running a hundred browser tabs is really missing the forest for the trees.
But I neeeeed 587 browser tabs for research!
I’m not against bloat, I just want it to be MY bloat
When there’s ads in my terminal
It’s relative. If you installed everything you need, then it probably isn’t bloated. Bloat is something you don’t need and keep getting updates. My home server has 300+ packages while my desktop has 900+ packages (cannot tell the exact numbers on mobile). I’m currently on EndeavourOS as well, though I’m thinking about moving to Void.
I love a bloated Linux system. Zeitgeist running in the background? Sweet, that means when I search for the file I was editing 3 days ago I’ll find it fast. Tracker busy indexing my files? Nice, next time I search for something the results will be near instantaneous.
That’s why I bought the ram, CPU and disk. To work for me, not the other way around. I’m daily driving a PC, not a server.
Removed by mod
FSearch is an indexed search too.
Removed by mod
Ok, I’m not advocating for any particular indexing service, I’m advocating for all. You’re advocating for this one in particular. We’re in agreement.
If you frequently use the software and there’s no easy alternative, is it really bloat?
Are you sure you’re answering the right comment? If you are, you lost me.
You said you love a system with lots of useful processes running in the background. My comment questions if these useful background processes are really bloat, at least in your system.
I am not about to descend into a philosophical discussion of the nature of bloatware. There’s a definition somewhere, but I’d rather use the tried and true “I know it when I see it.”
The minute any Electron application is installed, it’s GG
When my calculator app in windows is suspended, but has locked 29 threads and is using 60megs of ram. Not that those two values are significant, but why is my caluclator-app “suspended” when I closed it a few days ago since the last time I used it? Shouldn’t it just be
closedand not showing up at all.And why the fuck does a calculator app take 60MB of RAM when perfectly functional calculators ran on Windows 3.1 on systems with 8-24MB of RAM total?
Wake up boomer, new math just dropped
I don’t. Modern computers have a LOT of resources. The whole ‘minimalist computing’ thing some people go on about is really odd to me. And I say that as someone who remembers when 16K was impressive. I can see it for restricted environments, where every byte counts, but not for desktops.
My laptop is 6 years old and has been running arch Linux with xfce for most of that time. I got tired of maintaining it and changed to an “easy” Linux mint distro. It takes much longer to boot up now and feels generally sluggish in comparison to a minimal arch install. So from experience, in older hardware having a bloated distro can really slow down your system.
Personally, I consider a “bloated system” to be one that has a bunch of installed apps that I’ll never use…
The worst is when they can’t even be uninstalled.
Anxiety at its finest !!
So, basically every system then?
Not every system, no…
I have 12 cores and 64 GB RAM. I am not worried about “bloat”. The people trying to keep 20 year old Thinkpads running are.
16c/64gb Zen4 system here with optimised packages and kernel. I still care about bloat. Not from a performance reason obviously, but from a systems management / updates / attack surface point of view. Fewer packages == fewer breakages == fewer headaches.
Exactly, this is the reason I use Gentoo on my Zen3 12c w/ 32gb RAM. Smooth and clean. Nothing should stutter below 60 FPS or lagging when I hit a key on the keyboard.
Or maybe they’re trying to keep their system minimised from yet to be found security issues in the hundreds of packages pre installed that they don’t ever use or need, and act as nothing other than additional threat surface.
The time you start caring is too late.
Despite the cores and the ram, the weekly updates on my arch are starting to compile shit for over 30 minutes and I am starting to think about what I can uninstall or whether I should set up my own arch repos that do the compiling out of sight.
I don’t feel like my system is bloated.
It probably isn’t bloated.
I guess it’s subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?
If someone is testing out several different DEs or WMs and installing meta-packages, then I suppose I might say that things are bloated because they could end up having multiple apps to control the same preferences along with different libraries, etc., and then when they decide to update it takes ages. That would be bloated for me. I have tried the minimal stuff before. Like you said, hundreds of packages, not thousands. But, I didn’t install any manpages. So when I decided I wanted those manpages the number of packages ballooned. Nothing was really bloated, just a number on neofetch going up.
This summarises my thought process on the whole thing really nicely.
Shouldn’t have said it any better myself
I’d define “bloat” as functionality (as in: program code) present on my system that I cannot imagine ever needing to use.
There will never be a system that is perfectly tailored to my needs because there will always be some piece of functional code that I have no intention of using. Therefore, any system is “bloated” and it’s a question to which degree it is “bloated”.
The degree depends on which kind of resources the “bloat” uses and how much of it. The more significant the resource usage, the more significant the effect of the “bloat”. The kind of resource is used defines how critical some amount of usage is. 5% Power, CPU, IO, RAM or disk usage have varying degrees of criticality for instance.
Some examples:
This system has a calendar app installed by default. I don’t use it, so it’s certainly bloat but I also don’t care because it’s just a few megs on disk at worst and that doesn’t hurt me in any way.
Firefox frequently uses most of my RAM and >1% CPU util at “idle” but it’s a useful application that I use all the time, so it’s not bloat.
The most critical resource usage of systemd (pid1) on my system is RAM which is <0.1%. It provides tonnes of essential features required on a modern system and therefore not even worth thinking about when it comes to bloat.
I just noticed that mbrola voices sneaked into my closure again which is like 700MiB of voice synthesis data for many languages that I don’t have a need for. Quite a lot of storage for something I don’t ever need. This is significant bloat. It appears Firefox is drawing it in but it looks like that can be disabled via an override, so I’ll do that right now.
When do you consider a system to be bloated?
When I see a service or process running and I have no idea what it’s for.
Disk space isn’t so much of a concern for me so package size and count is fairly irrelevant (this system is above 1500) because a lot of it is just things I use rarely.
My definition of software bloat is when the feature set creeps up to including features that the vast majority of users do not need to a degree that starts impeding the usefulness and usability of the software.
FreeCAD, for example. FreeCAD has several workbenches that it did or still does ship with that no one has a use for. The Robot bench, for example, which simulates those giant robot arms that build cars. The venn diagram of people who work with those robots and people who use FreeCAD are two circles 284 miles apart. There is/was a Ship bench that could draw a boat hull in one click. No one on earth needs that. A working Assembly bench? Still years away. Who on earth needs that? I’ve hidden a full third of the stock workbenches just to reduce the noise in the dropdown menu and it’s made the software more comfortable to use.
Linux Mint includes a LOT of little utilities, lots of little CLI programs and whatnot that the majority of users will never use, but other than occupying a few dozen MB of disk space it’s not really a problem. It doesn’t get in the way.
