[Flame Bait] - Linux as bloatware

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, John Wendel wrote:

>
> Food for thought,
>
> http://news.com.com/Negroponte+Slimmer+Linux+needed+for+100+laptop/2100-7346_3-6057456.html?tag=nefd.lede
>
> * BOSTON--The One Laptop Per Child organization will use Linux on its 
> inexpensive machines, but the operating system suffers the same code bloat as 
> Windows, the project's leader said Tuesday.*

Oddly enough this is a something I've been doing a lot of thinking about. 
but of course oversimplicafication and blanket statements only go so fair.

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.

My nokia 770 runs a 2.6 kernel, multiuser environment, xwindows, gtk+ and 
a web browser and a couple shells, in 1/2 as much ram (64MB) and 1/4 as 
much flash (128) as the $100 pc, all on a 200mhz arm to boot.

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.

We have a benchmark for functionality that is basically all the stuff a 
general purpose laptop/desktop can reasonably contain. Using existing 
software and reduced expectations it's pretty easy to make a well featured 
linux distro fit on a machine with 128MB of ram and 512MB of flash and 
still have room left to grow.

To quote Antoine de Saint ExupÃry, "perfection is achieved not when I have 
nothing left to add, but rather when I have nothing left to take away". Of 
course that probably applies more accurately to a single artistic 
expression then it does to a pile of mostly unrelated software. It can 
still be adopted as a guiding principle for packaging software for 
resource limited devices. To a very great extent the tools exist for linux 
to do this already and the evidence of that can be found in all sorts of 
embedded devices. There is a certain level of artistry that goes into 
building the software to power a consumer device, and having the best 
tools available to you is still no guarantee of success.



> "People aren't thinking about small, fast, thin systems," said Nicholas 
> Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child 
> <http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flaptop.org%2F&siteId=3&oId=2100-7346-6057456&ontId=1001&lop=nl.ex> 
> nonprofit association, in a speech at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo 
> <http://news.com.com/LinuxWorld+not+just+for+Linux+fans+anymore/2009-7346_3-6056446.html?tag=nl> 
> here. "Suddenly it's like a very fat person (who) uses most of the energy to 
> move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too."
>
> Regards,
> John
>
>

-- 
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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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