[Flame Bait] - Linux as bloatware

Jeff Vian jvian10 at charter.net
Tue Apr 11 01:32:33 UTC 2006


On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 02:02 -0400, Neil Cherry wrote:
> Joel Jaeggli wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I've also given this a lot of thought. I started using FC 1, upgraded
> parts to FC2 and live a quasi-mess between FC2 and FC3 (Libraries
> messed me up). I tried to run Gentoo and it fit nicely on a 2G disk
> with my various servers (but no X GUI) and dev sys. The problem was
> that they were doing thing like BSD and I grew up with AT&T. So I
> didn't always know how to do things. I'm just amazed as the bloat
> going into the new systems. Do you know it take 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.
> 
> > 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 opinion is that the Linux kernel isn't at fault it's the
> distributions and the Windows managers. Why is the power meter's
> suddenly running on my desktop computer? How come when I uninstall
> various apps I suddenly find the supporting libraries being yanked.
> I'm finding all of this very annoying. I may start building my own
> distribution just so I can trim down the fat.

The number of applications that are chosen are a good bit of the bloat,
that is for sure.

> 
> > 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).




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