8 Nov
2006
8 Nov
'06
2:57 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 7 Nov 2006 at 3:03, Jules Richardson wrote:
Step back and think about it for awhile--put yourself back 20 years
to 1986 and consider what you could have done with a gig of disk
space and 32 megs of RAM. Think about where such resources would put
you 30 years ago...
So, bloat is everywhere. Probably in 10 years, if I live that long,
I'll be mumbling the same thing about OSes that require 1TB of disk
and 32GB of RAM. :)
But there's a different between bloat and features that a particular user
*needs*, though. I don't mind vendors piling in features so much - providing
that I get to choose which ones I want installed on *my* system. It's only
bloat when it's unwanted.
Sadly UNIX is going the way of Windows - you get given what comes with an app,
and never mind if you never use 90% of the functionality. OK, that's an unfair
percentage - but I bet that 30% of my most-used apps consist of junk code
which I don't actually need. And that's just the visual cruft that I know
about; I bet there's a lot more under the covers because my apps either
contain functionality also provided by some of the libraries which they
reference, or they require a library which provides extra services not needed
by my system.
Then of course there's all the zillion utilities which I never need - except
that they're there because I have zero idea which ones get used behind the
scenes and there's no tracking of what gets called when, so I don't know which
ones I can safely remove.
So what, broadly speaking 50% or so of stuff installed on my machine is
probably unwanted or unnecessary, but I'm pretty much stuck with it. That's
the Linux picture too - it must be worse for the Windows guys.
cheers
Jules