[Flame Bait] - Linux as bloatware

[Neil Cherry]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 02:02 -0400, Neil Cherry wrote:
>> Joel Jaeggli wrote:
>>> On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, John Wendel wrote:

>> didn't always know how to do things. I'm just amazed as the bloat
>> going into the new systems. Do you know it takes 1G+ of disk space to
>> rpmbuild and install a Fedora kernel?
>>
>>> Linux distro's tend to err on the side of completness. Striping all the 
>>> non-esential bits for a given use case can get you quite a long way in 
>>> the direction you want to be even before you start attacking shared 
>>> libraries and questionable software development practices... I got 
>>> redhat 8 down to about about 300MB on a flash card with about two days 
>>> of work when I built a special purpose machine around a 486 based 
>>> soekris board a couple years ago.

>> I used to run RH 6.2 on a 120M drive with 32M swap. I'll never get
>> Fedora to run on that.
> 
> DOS used to run from a floppy disk, and even with dos 6.22 it needed
> less than 2 mb of space to install. It also only needed 32k of ram.
> You can't get Windows to do that either.

DOS ran in 576K of ram (with the command line loaded) to get it to
drop it's memory usage it required that you used a driver and extended
memory.

I can't remember how much disk space it required. The 120M above is
with emacs (no .el files) and the gcc compiler (but very little
else). I know that Turbo C doesn't take up too much room (2.1).

>>> My laptop one the other hand has both gnome and kde, mono, java, vmware, 
>>> a complete development evironment, and at least three office suites in 
>>> it. It's not really the OS or the distro that's bloated it's my 
>>> expectation of completeness that led me to have all the crap 
>>> installed... It's having 40 or 50 webpages in tabs averaging 200KB of 
>>> objects on each one open, it's driving a 1920x1200 display in 24 bit 
>>> color on an intel shared memory video chipset.
>> I've got 14G of disk space on my laptop and after I clean up I
>> only have ~1G free. That 1G tends to fill up quickly and I
>> have to go fishing for things to delete. I'm not happy.
>>
> You must have a lot of un-needed stuff.  My install is only about 6 gb
> with everything I routinely choose.  All the games and almost everything
> that pirut can install (except KDE).

I needed to load almost everything.

-- 
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