Wow, I am Surprised that Linux is Bloated
September 30, 2009 by Milo Riano
Filed under Computers
Ok, I belong to the Microsoft World and despite our allegiance to the software giant, my colleagues and I have called Microsoft products as bloatware. Windows Vista is the biggest proof that Microsoft products are indeed bloated as the software keeps on getting bloated for every update Microsoft releases. And yes, Microsoft products are mostly bloated.
On the other side of the fence, Linux has the reputation as an operating system that is optimized, lean and lightweight which is why the industry was surprised and shocked on the comment of Linuz Torvalds during the LinuxCon last week that Linux is bloated. He says that the operating system is both huge and scary.
I think this is the perspective of a person who was involved in the early days or the origin of Linux. Linus has been there and for decades he has seen every feature that was added to the operating system. I could not imagine what Linus is feeling right now. Whether the operating system is indeed bloated or not, I have no idea.
As I said this is probably the perspective of someone who was there at the beginning. I can imagine as I have felt the same way with all the projects I have worked on. My current project for example has started back in February 2009, and I was the one who built things from scratch making sure every standard and optimization is present. Several months after, thousands of man hours from almost 20 resources moving codes back and forth, and I feel the architecture of the system is bloated. When I go back to the code, I can see the huge features added to it already and while I feel it is now huge and scary, I need to let go knowing that these things are bound to happen.
I understand how Linus feels especially when thousands of developers, and millions of man hours has already been put on the Linux operating system. No man could keep up with it, I just hope Linus does let go as the bloated nature of applications are always bound to happen.
How about you? Do you really think Linux is bloated? Or is this just a natural thing bound to happen? Or is this just a perspective from Linus?
Image from Linux.
I don’t think so. As far as i remember the kernel was always bloated, but that’s normal because of the amount of devices it supports. For the user point of view, linux seems bloated because of the amount of apps and libs most distros install by default. Things get worse when some distros (or some package maintainers) implement insane dependencies on their packages. For example, last night i was trying to make a fedora minimal install. Then, after i added a non-free repository, i installed the proprietary nvidia drives. Guess what: xorg, and nouveau (the open source nvidia drives) packages came as dependency.
That’s only one example. Debian is the same. I think those distros are not created do allow a sane minimal install. That’s the way they are.
That said, i’m a ArchLinux user and i am very happy with the way the dependencies are created. Only the dependencies required are installed, not the recommended/optional ones. You should try Arch.
I risk a flame war here, but in FLOSS the goal is to always have smaller, better, faster code. It is open and modifiable, and if you want your code to be used it had better be good or it gets replaced. On the Windows side of things, the goal seems to be to push for upgrades, so making the software on Windows more resource hungry drives hardware sales, and faster hardware allows for more bloated software; its a cycle that doesn’t end.
Linux may be bloated to the coder who works with the kernel all day long, but when my machine is running faster than ever with the same hardware (due to improvements in the kernel and other parts of the system), and it’s much faster than it would be with a Windows OS, then I can accept its current level of ‘bloat’ because its not really an issue in my setup. Even my EeePC 701 with its 900MHz Celeron processor runs just fine for what I need it to do.