Bloat

[figueroa]

A good, user-oriented, general-purpose, desktop distribution needs to have preinstalled a nicely selected suite of software to make it useful to most users out-of-the-box, without excessive size, unnecessary vulnerability, and reasonable system load, while remaining stable and easy to maintain. MX-Linux is doing a good job of hitting that sweet spot.

[oops]

"Bloat: Software/Apps I don't use that have the potential to allow security breaches into my system."
@Michael-IDA ... Yes, but In this case, all kernel modules also have this potentiality ;-)

You have a brain... Seriously, you know what I mean, as it's somewhat hard to run a Linux system without the kernel...

... It's exactly the same process, not all embedded modules are needed into the kernel, few are enough to run a computer.

[uncle mark]

So, to you, what is bloat and more importantly why and how.

"Bloat" to me is more about "feel" than size or running processes or RAM usage or whatever other metric you might use. Of course, that makes my definition of bloat dependent on hardware.

Windows is "bloated", obviously. Ubuntu and Mint feel bloated. On my desktop, MX is quick and snappy and just "feels" right. On my laptops with old weak processors, some programs <cough> Firefox <cough> take too darn long to launch and bog down more easily than they should. But the OS itself performs better than I could ask for.

[Adrian]

Windows is "bloated", obviously.

I was thinking about that when I was downloading a Nvidia driver update, about 800MB and then I found on Nvidia forum this question:

Why the size of the drivers is so high? If I go to "Programs and Features" I can see that the size of nVIDIA Drivers is 2.54 GB, Is there a problem with my PC or what? I have the newest drivers.

Or when you see a folder c:\Windows\servicing\LCU with 166,000 files and 2GB... presumably updates? But yeah some idiots comment that antiX with an entire system of 1.4GB is "bloated"...

[bassplayer69]

The problem these days about "bloat" is that the majority of these "bloat" applications are all the dependencies that they need and other applications which depend on a library from the "bloat" package, etc. As a package maintainer for Slackware Linux, I see it all the time with any KDE, XFCE, or any other X Desktop Environment. Try removing one of these "bloat" packages and you'll have to uninstall the whole Desktop Environment. lol :) But, true to the OP. When I read those reviews and they say the distro has bloat, please back that statement up and provide what you consider "bloat" and what do you offer to remove that "bloat".

[Adrian]

When I read those reviews and they say the distro has bloat, please back that statement up and provide what you consider "bloat" and what do you offer to remove that "bloat".

One person's useful package is another person's bloat.

But there's a simple solution -- remove the offending package(s) and remaster or even take a snapshot. MX and antiX have these useful tools that allow you to create your freaking customized ISO -- people have no right to demand packages to be removed from the official release (unless they make no sense there for most of the people). They can simply do that by themselves and take a snapshot then they can use that to their heart content. For example when I want to create a lean custom ISO for troubleshooting/PC cloning, etc I know I will never use Thunderbird, dictionaries, themes, fonts, etc I remove them and create an ISO < 1GB. But that's my own preference. It's also minimal work, removing stuff takes minutes, a LZ4 remaster takes 1-2 minutes too if not less, if you have problem you can always boot with "roolback" to go back to the functional remaster, it's really easy....

[wdscharff]

Bloat, I know the term from the Windows world. That was the garbage that came with PCs "off the shelf" that NOBODY else wanted.
From HP, for example, a "desktop" attachment for children with its own paint and write program. Advertising, Affiliates, Norton Antivirus AND Avira, although the Windows Defender was already installed and active and a dozen other applications. Everything was so tightly interlocked in the system that you needed half a working day to get the dirt off the computer (but only if you had done that before and knew where to do what, including direct editing in the registry). Of course, also some MS Office variant with 4 weeks runtime limitation, to "test". The Recoverysystem was on a hidden 20GB partition, there was no longer an original Windows installation CD at department store computers. This created then no simple installation CD, but 3 DVDs, which were of course only usable on this computer and if you actually needed them ... the installation took 5x as long, as with an installation CD of the Pro version.

Who under Linux of "Bloat" babbles, which does not know for a long time, what Bloat really is he is like a spoiled affluent child, because a Distri does not meet his "requirements" to 100% and he must remove perhaps times 5 minutes himself what.
Surprises me actually, with a user group that on the other hand is always so proud to use an operating system, because it gives them among other things exactly this freedom to remove or add what they want :-)

[AK-47]

Bloat is what happens to a dead body that is left out for some time unnecessary use of resources to accomplish a task that can easily be accomplished with fewer resources, usually because of unnecessary features or things that are completely irrelevant to the task at hand.
For instance, Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) had lots of skins and styling options for it, none of which looked like the native OS. Considering that this is meant to be a serious security tool, this was ridiculous and resembled the idiocy demonstrated by "registry cleaners" of the 2000's.

Now people love to associate bloat with Windows, and to me this is completely fair. Windows has a history of adding useless software that gets in the way. Cortana, anyone? But, another form of bloat, is ecosystem bloat. Usually a result of Not-Invented-Here syndrome, you have nonsense like dozens of different incompatible GUI toolkits, audio subsystems, package managers, initialisation systems (I mean really!), etc. So for those who think Windows is more bloaty than Linux, well, it depends on what bloat you're talking about.

[LU344928]

Bloat, I know the term from the Windows world.

Yeah I remember Win 2000's newly installed footprint was around 800mb but in XP that rose to over 3gb.

I recently helped a friend purchase a new laptop. It had to be Win 10 of course and what an ordeal it was to try and get rid of Spotify which he was never gonna use and the nag screens at startup were just too much. I said try as I gave up in the end and advised him to take it back to the shop and let them deal with it.

[agnivo007]

Bloat, what I knew about, is associated with bloating paper; where the paper soaks up the ink or whatever and gets swollen as the result. I guess that's what people relate with swollen apps and resource usage in computers these days. Yes, it was inevitable and much needed for the entire industry to post growth with better accounting numbers and make the users not stick to decade old solutions as they say. In some way, in a limit it is ok; when overdone, then comes the controversy and debate relating to linux, windows and other software junk.