7 Dec
2005
7 Dec
'05
4:06 a.m.
Wai-Sun Chia wrote:
A lot have been said about the apparent
"bloat" in current Linux...
and I disagree. The same people who typically complained about bloat
will typically complain about "but Linux doesn't have XXXX application
which I need.." You can CHOOSE not to install the "bloaty" stuff. One
man's bloat is another man's lifesaver.
It's a lot of work to not install bloat, though. Packages for all modern Linux
distros tend to be very coarse grain and you get lots of junk that you don't need.
Yesterday's example was mplayer - about 12MB for the install, another 12MB for
codecs, then it wanted things like lame, divx, theora, xvidcore (I'm reading
off the shell's history here :) before it'd even run. There were probably
more, but I gave up at that point.
I ended up building from source which works fine and does what I need to do
without all the extras that are required by a packaged system - but it means
that there's no record on the system of any mplayer "package", so it'll
be
hard to know what to remove if it ever comes to it.
*this* is where the problem is - you either get screwed by packages coming
with (and requiring) lots of extras that you don't need, or you get screwed by
having to build stuff from source.
Packages are great if you have gigs of disk space - but the concept of a
package is too coarse if you're after a lean manageable system. Hopefully
someone with enough clout is thinking about this...
As far a bloat is concerned, just blast KDE/Qt,
But it does do some things well. Yet I see all sorts of KDE apps installed
that I don't need - no doubt because the package was "KDE applications",
there
was something in there that I *did* need, and so I had to install them all.
(I'm curious now as to what a "wallet management tool" is... my wallet's
in my
pocket - what on earth about it needs managing on my computer? :)
Building a more modern and integrated environment is a noble and worthy thing
to do, I'd say. But only if the underlying architecture is sound and still
gives the freedom of choice / control that Unix users have always had. Both
KDE and Gnome seem to suffer from a Windows-like philosophy of "install as
many features as possible so that we look better than the competition"
Comments on how well OSX handles this would be welcome.
I suspect the Linux lot missed a trick about 5 years ago and should have
designed and built a desktop environment up from scratch rather than just
lifting concepts from Windows.
p.s. I typically go around using console mode for at
least a couple of
hours everyday. Console mode with framebuffer at 1024x768 is great!!
Heh. A graphical email client just works better for me, and I couldn't do
image editing without a desktop or a graphical web browser, but other than
that I tend to just have five or six shell windows open for doing most things.
cheers
Jules