[mdlug] Are Linux Distros Too Bloated?

[Steve Litt]

Robert James Fulner said on Sun, 16 Apr 2023 18:56:51 +0000

>I think I really matters what you mean, but probably yes, particularly
>if your focus is on desktop distributions aimed at end users.
>
>I'm pretty sure this has been a conscious decision by the community
>for a couple reasons. 

I have a reason most don't think about, but first...

> Most new desktop users will likely have fairly
>recent hardware that has less concern for bloat. 

Modern machines' spectacular resources are a good reason not to
prioritize code efficiency over everything else. There was a time when
the "return from subroutine" assembler command was too time consuming,
so they used gotos, and the result was spaghetti code that was murder
to debug. Nobody would do that today.

For printing 80x66 monofont paper reports, I couldn't use a 2
dimensional 80x66 array because of memory constraints, so I coded up a
rather clever context structure and accompanying atxyprint() function
to make printing at specific places easy. Today that would be insane.

Trouble is, a lot of developers have the "spend it if you got it"
mentality, consuming huge resources with non-modualar code, features to
handle edge cases which in turn create several edge cases that have to
be handled, on and on, forever and ever, amen. Read the dbus
specification now. Systemd now has 1.2 million lines of code. Most GTk
applications throw dozens of warnings because GTk is so hard to deal
with. Not that Qt is much better.

====

And now for my promised other reason for the bloat...

In the late 1980's I was a contract developer for a worldwide law firm
where the secretaries used DOS and Wordperfect, and used them quite
well, as did some of the younger attorneys. Secretaries created macros.
They hacked printers. They were perfectly at home with the command
line. Anyone with an IQ over 80 was.

Gates and Jobs knew they couldn't make money with simple and perfectly
functional OSes like DOS and whatever the Apple II had. It was too easy
for competitors to create applications for DOS and Apple, so they
spread the falsehood that people were too stupid to use the command
line as an excuse to bring in truly awful GUIs not just for graphical
programs, which would make sense, but for inherently text based input
and output. This way they could keep the efficient parts of their APIs
secret, so their competitors couldn't compete (this happened to
WordPerect). 

And their excuse for GUI everything? Because only geniuses could use
the command line, and normal people were so helpless they couldn't
operate a command line or even menu interface. The public bought it,
and Microsoft and Apple laughed all the way to the bank. This same myth
that the public is stupid is still used today. Redhat and
Freedesktop.org make a career of it, using bloat to supposedly cater to
the supposedly stupid public. While the boaters laugh all the way to
the bank. And those of us who want to boss our computer instead of
having our computers boss us are the losers in this trend. 

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm