When do you consider a system to be bloated?

I find it bloated if the system have things I don't need are noticeably using up RAM and CPU. I couldn't care less about extra unused packages on disk, they're dormant. I don't care about a few daemons or resident apps I don't use either if they're idle all the time and use minimal RAM. Bloat for me is something that noticeably affects my running system.

When there's ads in my terminal

I'm not against bloat, I just want it to be MY bloat

It's relative. If you installed everything you need, then it probably isn't bloated. Bloat is something you don't need and keep getting updates. My home server has 300+ packages while my desktop has 900+ packages (cannot tell the exact numbers on mobile). I'm currently on EndeavourOS as well, though I'm thinking about moving to Void.

The minute any Electron application is installed, it’s GG

I love a bloated Linux system. Zeitgeist running in the background? Sweet, that means when I search for the file I was editing 3 days ago I’ll find it fast. Tracker busy indexing my files? Nice, next time I search for something the results will be near instantaneous.

That’s why I bought the ram, CPU and disk. To work for me, not the other way around. I’m daily driving a PC, not a server.

When my calculator app in windows is suspended, but has locked 29 threads and is using 60megs of ram. Not that those two values are significant, but why is my caluclator-app "suspended" when I closed it a few days ago since the last time I used it? Shouldn't it just be closed and not showing up at all.

My laptop is 6 years old and has been running arch Linux with xfce for most of that time. I got tired of maintaining it and changed to an "easy" Linux mint distro. It takes much longer to boot up now and feels generally sluggish in comparison to a minimal arch install. So from experience, in older hardware having a bloated distro can really slow down your system.

I don't. Modern computers have a LOT of resources. The whole 'minimalist computing' thing some people go on about is really odd to me. And I say that as someone who remembers when 16K was impressive. I can see it for restricted environments, where every byte counts, but not for desktops.

Personally, I consider a "bloated system" to be one that has a bunch of installed apps that I'll never use....

I don't feel like my system is bloated.

It probably isn't bloated.

I guess it's subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?

If someone is testing out several different DEs or WMs and installing meta-packages, then I suppose I might say that things are bloated because they could end up having multiple apps to control the same preferences along with different libraries, etc., and then when they decide to update it takes ages. That would be bloated for me. I have tried the minimal stuff before. Like you said, hundreds of packages, not thousands. But, I didn't install any manpages. So when I decided I wanted those manpages the number of packages ballooned. Nothing was really bloated, just a number on neofetch going up.

I'd define "bloat" as functionality (as in: program code) present on my system that I cannot imagine ever needing to use.

There will never be a system that is perfectly tailored to my needs because there will always be some piece of functional code that I have no intention of using. Therefore, any system is "bloated" and it's a question to which degree it is "bloated".

The degree depends on which kind of resources the "bloat" uses and how much of it. The more significant the resource usage, the more significant the effect of the "bloat". The kind of resource is used defines how critical some amount of usage is. 5% Power, CPU, IO, RAM or disk usage have varying degrees of criticality for instance.

Some examples:

This system has a calendar app installed by default. I don't use it, so it's certainly bloat but I also don't care because it's just a few megs on disk at worst and that doesn't hurt me in any way.

Firefox frequently uses most of my RAM and >1% CPU util at "idle" but it's a useful application that I use all the time, so it's not bloat.

The most critical resource usage of systemd (pid1) on my system is RAM which is <0.1%. It provides tonnes of essential features required on a modern system and therefore not even worth thinking about when it comes to bloat.

I just noticed that mbrola voices sneaked into my closure again which is like 700MiB of voice synthesis data for many languages that I don't have a need for. Quite a lot of storage for something I don't ever need. This is significant bloat. It appears Firefox is drawing it in but it looks like that can be disabled via an override, so I'll do that right now.

When do you consider a system to be bloated?

When I see a service or process running and I have no idea what it's for.

Disk space isn't so much of a concern for me so package size and count is fairly irrelevant (this system is above 1500) because a lot of it is just things I use rarely.

My definition of software bloat is when the feature set creeps up to including features that the vast majority of users do not need to a degree that starts impeding the usefulness and usability of the software.

FreeCAD, for example. FreeCAD has several workbenches that it did or still does ship with that no one has a use for. The Robot bench, for example, which simulates those giant robot arms that build cars. The venn diagram of people who work with those robots and people who use FreeCAD are two circles 284 miles apart. There is/was a Ship bench that could draw a boat hull in one click. No one on earth needs that. A working Assembly bench? Still years away. Who on earth needs that? I've hidden a full third of the stock workbenches just to reduce the noise in the dropdown menu and it's made the software more comfortable to use.

Linux Mint includes a LOT of little utilities, lots of little CLI programs and whatnot that the majority of users will never use, but other than occupying a few dozen MB of disk space it's not really a problem. It doesn't get in the way.

A linux is bloated if it has packages installed thaz you don’t need.

I love my bloated Arch.btw (honestly after installing arch once normally, I installed it using EndeavourOS installer (still Arch in my opinion))

if you don't have a printer, but it runs cups (and maybe even re-installs it when you remove it)

looking at you, ubuntu 😐

Have in mind that package count is unique to each package manager and how the distribution packages. So those numbers of package count are not really meant to be compared across distributions. Unless it is basically the same distribution in another coat. BTW I am also running EndeavourOS, so we can compare each other well. :-) My desktop has 1.5k packages with pacman and 14 through flatpak. To me this is already "bloated" compared to the initial installation. Especially as I was a tiling window manager user and now use KDE Plasma.

The term "bloat" is off course relative; that's why you ask this question in the first place, right? Besides that the term is also often used to just exaggerate and not meant literally, just to denounce (I had to look up the word, hopefully it's correct :D). It depends on the context of what people mean by bloat and what their goals are. I think it's obvious that a slim distribution can still be bloat for someone else. In example if the initial installation already has most application a user needs, then there is not much left to install and the user may feel its slim. For someone else who handpicks every single bit, this bloated mess might look ... well bloated.

It also depends on what the goals of the installation is, if multiple users are using it, what the purpose of the machine is (laptop, server, gaming, programming, nothing) and what hardware it has. For some people the entire concept of a desktop environment or systemd are bloat. Not because the user bloated the system, but the distribution is.

I don't know man. It doesn't matter what others say, as long as you are happy; and as long as your system functions well. Don't forget, the more libraries, packages and applications you have installed, the slower are the updates and the bigger of a chance for failure or security issues can arise. There are good reasons to maintain a slim system and I just listed a few important ones. But whatever it is, don't let people tell you what bloat means, because you should have your own definition of the word. Just like what you think is good and bad. And my reply gone longer than expected.

Edit: I forgot to mention something. One of the reasons I feel a system is bloated, when it has ton of packages and applications installed that I don't need or use. Maybe a simple small application has ton of dependencies, which makes it feel like totally bloated.

I have 12 cores and 64 GB RAM. I am not worried about "bloat". The people trying to keep 20 year old Thinkpads running are.

I don't even care anymore. I've got a system with 1TB of SSD space and 16GB of RAM that I mostly use to open a browser.
Install all the desktop environments for all I care.

Any stuff that I'll only rarely use and that isn't essential to make the OS work, I guess. It has nothing to do with resource usage for me

I just installed Red Hat 5.2 a couple of days ago ( true story ). It is so light-weight with its Fvwm window manager, bash 1.2, and GCC 2.7.2. It even had Netscape Navigator! Who could ask for more? Anything more is bloat!

Just kidding. Bloat is installing things you do not use or that do not make your system better. I think some desktop environments add bloat. Mostly though, even the heavy ones represent a smaller fraction of system resources than their ancestors did on older systems.

If you have 3000 packages you use, who cares? However, if you have 3000 packages and only use a dozen of them, maybe your system is bloated.

I use a lot of older hardware. So, I like a fairly lean base system. I still use a lot of software though. I don’t think that is bloat.

Idk. I use Ubuntu (although the MATE flavour, not sure about the default version) and I don't feel it's bloated (there are preinstalled apps that I don't use but I stilk don't feel it's bloated). One example that I consider bloated is stock Android on most phones where you have Facebook and Instagram preinstalled (two social media ffs), GDrive and OneDrive, and those useless vendor apps (Samsung Pay, Samsung Store or whatever that is). It's just too much. Worse is they're all privacy nightmares.

I'd say that bloat is whatever you define it to be and can vary depending on the power of your system.

I care less about how much resources apps are taking up on my desktop (32GB RAM, Ryzen 7700X), but I do bring my concerns over to my laptop (8GB RAM, Ryzen 4500U).

the one thing I cannot stand are electron apps and anything similar. they are a whole browser bundled with an unoptimized interface, and will eat up what used to be a decent amount of RAM for a laptop back then, as well as my battery life. for this reason I always try to find native apps that use less power and less RAM, which in turn improve my battery life.

this is just one example of where you can draw the line for bloat, although you are completely correct in saying that it is subjective.

People favor Arch Linux for configurability, not lack of bloat. With the level of configurability that Arch offers, any DE can look bloated. On the other hand, if you are a new Linux user or someone who just wants to use the computer without so much personalization, anything Linux offers is lightweight enough. Even a decade old system has enough hardware to handle modern Linux distros effortlessly. This is probably what a regular user wants anyway.

I don't really care about "bloat" (whatever that means) I care about the system not being in chaos. I keep my bare system as clean as possible and install everything in a container, flatpak or VM.

"Bloat" implies "excess", "overloaded" -- anything that has been installed and used without my consent or a badly optimized package/command.

When it's Ubuntu? When it's Fedora?

Relaaax. I keed, I keed.

It's bloated when I cant look at any given package having been installed and understand within three dependencies why.

If it affects system performance and gives me no noticeable benefit. Otherwise, flash bytes are cheap. I've got 30TB+ in my laptop. Why do I care if I have a 3GB OS or a 2.95GB OS?

Bloat is when unwanted software gets in my way of doing my tasks, whether it be active presence or background processing.

When installing pandoc, it’s doomed :)

For real, when I typed in the command to install it, there was a hundred package to install (Haskell bloat) so I gave up

To me bloat is anything using resources when I didn’t ask it to. Someday I’ll have more than 16 gigs of ram to throw around, maybe then I won’t be such a memory miser. One of the biggest things that pushed me into linux was the myriad of live service-esque background processes windows was forcing on me.

If I was a little less dyslexic I’d have a CLI for everything, now THAT’S efficiency!

When it got software/features I don’t use.

You answered it yourself in your post.

It is subjective.

I think the concept applies more to whats preinstalled and less to what you yourself install

To illustrate, personally I think:

Ubuntu is bloat, because when I used it it was a hassle to remove everythink I knew I never would use.

Archinstall without template is not bloat, because there is nothing installed that I would not use.

But archinstall with for example the KDE Plasma template is very bloated and it is a pain to uninstall what I don't need because of the meta packages.

when it eated too much

When it affects stability, functionality, or exceeds my abilty to secure it properly.

maybe if it has too many things I don't want.

But I find the concept a bit silly. A large number of installed things doesn't usually matter if they're not running. I had over 5k packages in my previous kubuntu that I was running for some 3y and it was just fine. The time and effort I'd spend cleaning it up and installing things as needed wouldn't translate into any perceived benefit imo.

I'm now running endeavour with a third of this number of packages, since it's a fresh install and not ubuntu. But other than some storage space and missing packages if I try to build something, I can't say there's much of a difference. As for storage, packages rank low in usage, for my desktop anyway.

It's bloat if it slows me down and brings me zero benefit. I have a few extra packages on my system, but it's still snappy. That's not bloat to me.

Bloat is relative to the user. If I have a piece of software installed that I don't use, it is bloat. If a program has features that I don't use (especially if they get in the way) they are bloat. Random config and cached files from programs long gone are bloat. It is not really about saving CPU/RAM/disk resources. It's like keeping my room clean. I also consider any UI element that is not strictly necessary bloat, because it gets in the way, takes up screen space and doesn't look clean. I have 485 packages on my 3+ year old Artix system right now (and some things I compile). Sometimes it can be higher if I use some extra software. But more than 700 hundred packages will start to feel uneasy. An example of bloat: I used startx to start my X server (like almost everyone else). Then I replaced it with a small shell script (sx). It worked exactly the same for me, I couldn't notice the difference. That means that everything startx provides over sx is bloat in my case: completely useless. You can see it as a form of minimalism.

When you notice it takes a long time to scroll past a lot of unused software in your application launcher to get to the one you want

A system us bloated when I feel it is bloated. It is highly subjective and there is no real line to cross. It is just more of a sliding scale, at one end there is no code on your system that you never use and at the other there is nothing on it that you ever want to use.

The former can likely on be reached on small microcontrollers where you have written everything exactly how you want it, and you would never even consider using the latter.

Realistically every system has things younever use, even the kernel has modules you will never load. And every non tiny program has features you never use. All of that is technically bloat but each instance I don't think makes your system or even an application feel bloated.

So really the question is when does the bloat bother you or get in your way. If you are trying to install an OS on a tiny embedded device where space is a premiumthenn you are going to draw that line at a different point to on the latest desktop with multi terabytes of storages and oodles of ram.

Anyone that claims there system has no bloat is technically lying to themselves. But if it makes them happy who cares? If your system has every package installed and it does not bother you at all thenitt does not matter at all.

I think it depends on the packages themselves. Do you have a lot of packages with overlapping functionality or are they packages that specifically focus on one function. I think its bloat when your file compression package also controls your rgb lights. Not all overlap is bad but too much is. Im a bit of a noob with linux though so grain of salt and all that

Usually never, I'd consider something bloated if the battery life is down 10%-25% without starting programs manually.

Bloat is when stuff you need pulls in tons of stuff it and even you doesnt even need. So that stuff gets updated, stored and even loaded to RAM.

Sometimes this is also a complex set of libraries, like GNOME and KDE have. There are tons of libraries, and especially when using Flatpak, you poorly always pull in all of them, as the runtime system is built like that. (Even though packagers could state the needed dependencies from that runtime, and then only those are downloaded)

If it does things in an intransparent way.

When l go to upgrade my system and my skin crawls.

Seriously though, generally I justwantt only what I actually use. I recently reinstalled because I had a bunch if useless junk that was eating space for zero gain.

I think there are several factors influencing when someone feel 'bloat'. There's the 'purists' that tend to optimize their system to be as 'lean & mean' as possible - relentlessly, and there's the simplists that just want a simple setup/dashbord they can control - without too many options/distractions from info-bloat. Info-bloat hints to different types of bloat: filesize, dependencies, gfx details/animations, option-bloat, monetization-bloat and so on. There may also be cultural tendencies within different distro communities gentoo, tendencies from those with the emacs syndrome, or other more political groupings..

The last factor I can imagine atmo is that the level of hardware is very important and low end operators will tend to see more bloat when things run slowly - no matter their 'bloat focus'.

I had some Pythoncode for you but couldnt get the codeblock to play along 🙃

Too many windows

I concider bloat to be either unneeded files/programs. So duplicated libraries, unused apps, not personal data files that are stagnant, anything similar to that. It's hard to put a metric on it, I just browse through my files every once and awhile and delete the unused stuff, but with the push for container based stuff I forsee that method will become increasingly harder as time goes on

I don't like when my PC/phone have a bunch of applications, so I try to delete all the ones I rarely use. Still some might find my devices bloated, but if I need/use them then I don't see an issue.

When stuff starts to get in your way or there is a performance hit greater than 7-10%.

Snaps are not bloat. Once I take 10 minutes to configure Firefox Snap disabling, it will never annoy me.

If the default software is shit (rarely on Linux), I replace it with better alternatives.

Using adblockers and systemwide HOSTS rules to block trackers/ads/junk/malware domains achieves 70-80% of the performance benefits in 5-10 minutes.

I use Debian 12 stable on computers alongside Windows and am happy.

If it has the following: -graphical file manager -graphical app store -"start menu" of some sort -graphical centralized settings app I use i3wm on gentoo or arch

Systemd continues to consume system functions with - bad - facsimiles, and for things like the /bin-/usr/bin decree they just don't actually get it.

I consider any system running systemd to be bloated and I stop caring about PACKAGE COUNT after that.