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| title | date | type | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Myth of Bloat | 2021-06-04 | post |
|
Originally posted on my old blog
If there's one thing that hardcore Linux users are ridiculously obsessed about, it's the vague and scary concept of bloat. You gotta keep package counts low, use WMs, and compile suckless.org stuff. Visit any Arch or Gentoo forum or chat, and this philosophy seems to be epidemical. But... there's a gaping problem: package count is totally irrelevant, WMs are painful to configure, and suckless.org software really sucks. Yes, it's all a load of nonsense.
Let's start with the term "bloat". What does it even mean? Wikipedia offers a few definitions, such as code bloat and software bloat which are definitely legitimate issues. However, this obsession with bloat seems to be about something different; an allergic aversion to any software that's sufficiently complex.
What about package counts?
It's actually really easy to get a very low package count: just install Windows and you can brag about having zero packages installed. Beat that!
Enough said about package count; The issue with WMs and other supposedly "minimalistic" software is that it's simply worse than its alternatives unless you use are purely optimizing for metrics like lowest number of lines of code. Holistically, they're just... worse.
Well, that was quite the rant.