mesyeti
Bloat
Bloatware is an issue that has been plaguing computers for many years. This wiki page goes into why it's an issue, and why it is much bigger of an issue than what you might think.
Speed of hardware
If you have an old computer or phone that you tried to use recently, you might notice it's slow. This is probably the main reason people buy a new computer/device, their old one became too slow. However, have you tried using an old device with its original software? I installed Windows XP on a laptop from 2006, and it ran at what was probably its original speed.
Here's the thing: hardware does not get slower, software does.
This is something I would be totally fine with, if we were in the last century. Computers evolved so fast that upgrades would be justified. But now, outside of games, my 2006 laptop and a Steam Deck can achieve the same things. I can write programs on both, watch videos, etc. Hardware performance has been perfectly able to do most things (outside of things that require lots of power like games, more on that later).
The Web
The Web has been a massively popular internet service for a long time now, and it introduced something that would start an era of slow software: JavaScript.
JavaScript didn't achieve this alone, JavaScript + web technology is creates bloatware. My ThinkPad T550 (a decent laptop from 2015) struggles to run YouTube alongside Discord, which is ridiculous. The Windows XP laptop can easily do video playback, and the better speeds of Wi-Fi in the ThinkPad should allow it to do video streaming very easily. But YouTube is still slow.
Something that makes it obvious how bloated web applications are is memory usage. I have Discord open right now, and it's using 626 megabytes of memory, over half a gigabyte. HexChat, an IRC client, uses only 56 megabytes of memory. I'm sure it can go a lot lower, if a chat program existed on a platform like Varvara/Uxn, but I don't know of any.
Consumerism is harmful
The preoccupation of society with the acquisition of consumer goods.
People keep buying new computers every few years because of bloatware slowing their "old" computers down. The older systems are seen as useless since they can't run the newest bloatware very well. Then, it becomes e-waste.
You can read about the environmental impact of e-waste here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste#Environmental_impact
E-waste is why I see consumerism with computers as evil. A large portion (probably the majority) of computer is e-waste is perfectly functioning computers. Remember what I said about the Windows XP laptop being able to achieve the same parts of general purpose computing that my Steam Deck can? Those perfectly functioning computers are computers that can be used for general purpose computing, and they would be great at doing that. Consumerism has made people think these are useless.
Fight bloatware and consumerism
You may be unable to fight corporations with issues like pollution, but this is something you can actually fight against, if you can program. There are two ways to fight:
- Make people aware of less bloated software
- Make less bloated software
Linux is becoming popular on "weaker" hardware for good reason, it's fast and (probably, depends on setup) won't slow down over time for no good reason (yes, no good reason - what functionality has changed in Windows over the past 20 years to justify that big of a slow down?). If you want to get people using Linux, pick a user-friendly distribution like Linux Mint. You really don't need the terminal to use it.
Making less bloated software that runs fine on "weaker" hardware isn't that bad either. As long as you don't use web technology, your software is almost always going to work fine on the "weaker" hardware. You can go as far as you want with making unbloated software. You could use GTK instead of Electron for making a GUI program (GTK is bloated, but much less than the web), or you can go as far as writing your programs in a stack based 16-bit virtual machine, with UI implemented from scratch.
In summary, bloatware is making computers slow, and the netbook in your drawers from 2009 is a powerful beast.