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.

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

When there’s ads in my terminal

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.

Personally, I consider a “bloated system” to be one that has a bunch of installed apps that I’ll never use…

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.

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))

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.

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.

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.

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.