mesyeti
Bloat
Bloatware is something quite a lot of people are aware of now, but they have a definition that is different to mine. Most people will view bloatware as extra apps or software preinstalled on their devices that they didn't want. This is common on phones and OEM Windows.
A smaller portion of people, mainly programmers, will also recognise bloat as software using pointlessly large and inefficient dependencies, such as Electron. This is a definition I take much further than the typical person. I call it "bloat tolerance".
For example, I don't think a text editor should use a graphical user interface. They work completely fine in a terminal while using significantly less memory and with less CPU usage. I just like doing as much as possible in the terminal
What's the big deal??
That's a question you might be asking. Why is bloat this insignificant such an issue for me? It surely doesn't matter if hardware keeps getting better.
The key part of this question is "hardware keeps getting better". This is where consumerism and planned obsolescence comes in. Companies that make your phones and your computers don't want a computing device to be a purchase that happens once. After all, they make a lot more money if you repeatedly buy one every 3 years. You are led to believe that your computer is getting slower. You see your computing device appear slower and believe it's time to get rid of it and buy a new one.
This slowdown is not a problem with the hardware. Software is becoming more and more bloated, making it slower on "older" devices. Computers are getting CPUs that are more and more powerful, when they don't even need to. There is so much lightweight software out there that doesn't aim to waste your resources.
This constant cycle of giving up on computers and buying new ones is harmful. E-waste is particularly bad because of the dangerous chemicals found in computers. A lot of e-waste ends up dumped in poor nations close to where people live. The chemicals in these computers eventually contaminates the land, water, and air surrounding it, and are often dismantled to retrieve certain materials.
I won't go on too much about the issue of e-waste. E-waste is mainly related to consumerism and lack of recycling. Computers are not the only devices being dumped in poor countries. If you want to read more about it, you can do so here: https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nations-says-united-nations
But think about what computers would be like if they were a one time purchase. CPUs today are significantly more powerful than they were 20 years ago, while not being that much more power hungry. If performance was the same as 20 years ago, then modern CPUs would have crazy effiency. Less power usage is always something good to aim for.
Another thing is, in my experience, bloated software has a lot more random bugs and glitches than unbloated software does. When I used to use Spotify, I would constantly notice bugs and glitches, while this never happens with cmus and VLC. It's a nice benefit to using less bloated software.
How can you use a less bloated computer?
Using a less bloated computer is possible for everyone. Some people may even be willing to make the sacrifices required for a completely unbloated system. But, most others (including me) will have to use as little bloat as they can. I still use YouTube. I still use Steam. It's a terrible thing that millions of people are forced to use bloated software, which also forces them into the cycle of throwing away functional computers and buying new ones.
The main part of creating a less bloated system is finding less bloated alternatives to what you already use. You can find the most performant alternatives by using a slow system. I have a netbook from 2007 (the fujitsu siemens amilo li 2727) and it works great for this. The next section is a list of unbloated alternatives that I recommend:
Recommended software
Note: I wrote this list with Linux and other unix-likes and unixes in mind. Not all of these pieces of software will work on Windows.
I would recommend that Windows users intending to create an unbloated computer system should install a Linux distribution such as Linux Mint. It is bloated but it will help to prepare for eventually creating an unbloated system.
Window manager
Tiling (X11)
Tiling (Wayland)
Floating (X11)
Floating (Wayland)
Desktop environment
Desktop environments are heavier than window managers but there are some lightweight ones.
- XFCE (Uses GTK)
- CDE (Common Desktop Environment)
- NsCDE (Modern CDE alternative)
- LXDE (Uses GTK)
Text editor
Image viewers
Music player
YouTube downloaders
Screenshot programs
Screen recorders
GPU Screen Recorder (Insanely high performance)
A large recommendation
I would recommend that anyone interested in reducing bloat to check out the uxn virtual machine. Uxn is a 16-bit virtual machine with a large collection of GUI software to use. I would recommend using these programs with the uxn11 implementation of the virtual machine, as it uses much less memory than the more portable uxnemu.
Bloat and resource usage
This was originally on the page about the web, but I decide to move it here as it ended up being kind of off-topic.
While typing this, I have Discord open in chromium and it's using 362 megabytes of memory. This is very excessive when there are programs doing things just as simple using significantly less memory. 362 megabytes is actually pretty small for Discord as I have seen it climb up to 600+ megabytes. You might think that this amount of memory usage is not big enough to complain about, but this is not true. Computer hardware has become excessive as a result of consumerism (it's better for the company/corporation if consumers repeatedly buy computers as "upgrades") and bloated software (usually ones using web technology). Very recently, eight gigabytes of RAM is seen as a minimum amount of RAM by people. This is because of bloated software. (Now this is feeling like the sequel to the bloat, maybe I will combine them in a new revision?) It is actually true that systems with even 512 megabytes of RAM are perfectly usable. As of 7 years ago, when I used a system with 512 megabytes of RAM (a Raspberry Pi Zero, great computer), I found it fine apart from the web being unbearably slow.
This should give a good idea of what a perfectly unbloated system would be like. There is really no need for such high amounts of memory (in a perfect world without bloat) as that would be excessive.