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less_retarded_wiki/bloat.md
Miloslav Ciz 16fc4bbb12 Update
2024-02-03 22:30:33 +01:00

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Bloat

Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of software and technology means overcomplication, unnecessary complexity and/or extreme growth in terms of source code size, overall complexity, number of dependencies, redundancy, unnecessary and/or useless features (e.g. feature creep) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs (crashes, unusable features, memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, ...), as well as great obscurity, ugliness, loss of freedom and waste of human effort. Simply put bloat is burdening bullshit. Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at its worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to capitalism causing commercialization, consumerism, rushed "just works" products, creating demand for newer hardware and so on, also allowing incompetent people ("let's push more women/minorities into programming") trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualified to do.

LRS, suckless and some others rather small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, minimal, reliable, efficient and well functioning. Nevertheless our numbers are very small and in this endeavor we are basically standing against the whole world and the most powerful tech corporations. The issue lies not only in capitalism pushing bloat but also in common people not seeing the issue (partly due to the capitalist propaganda promoting maximalism), no one is supporting the few people who are genuinely trying to create good tools, on the contrary such people often face hostility from the mainstream.

The issue of bloat may of course appear outside of the strict boundaries of computer technology, nowadays we may already observe e.g. science bloat -- science is becoming so overcomplicated (many times on purpose, e.g. by means of bullshit science) that 99% people can NOT understand it, they have to BELIEVE "scientific authorities", which does not at all differ from the dangerous blind religious behavior. Any time a new paper comes out, chances are that not even SCIENTISTS from the same field but with a different specialization will understand it in depth and have to simply trust its results. This combined with self-interest obsessed society gives rise to soyence and large scale brainwashing and spread of "science approved" propaganda.

Some have attempted to measure bloat, e.g. the famous web bloat score (https://www.webbloatscore.com/) measures bloat of websites as its total size divided by the page screenshot size (e.g. YouTube at 18.5 vs suckless.org at 0.386). It has been observed that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster, which is now known as Wirth's law; this follows from Moore's law (speed of hardware doubles every 24 months) being weaker than Gate's law (speed of software halves every 18 months); or in other words: the stupidity of soydevs outpaces the brilliancy of geniuses.

Despite this there isn't any completely objective measure that would say "this software has exactly X % of bloat", bloat is something judged based on what we need/want, what tradeoffs we prefer etc. The answer to "how much bloat" there is depends on the answer to "what really is bloat?". To answer this question most accurately we can't limit ourselves to simplifications such as lines of code or number of package dependencies -- though these are very good estimates for most practical purposes, a more accurate insight is obtained by carefully asking what burdens and difficulties of ANY kind come with given technology, and also whether and how much of a necessary evil they are. Realize for example that if your software doesn't technically require package X to run or be compiled, package X may be de facto required for your software to exist and work (e.g. a pure multiplayer game client won't have the server as a dependency, but it will be useless without a server, so de facto all bloat present in the server is now in a wider sense also the client's burden). So if you've found a program that's short and uses no libraries, you still have to check whether the language it is written in isn't bloated itself, whether the program relies on running on a complex platform that cannot be implemented without bloat, whether some highly complex piece of hardware (e.g. GPU or 8GB of RAM) is required, whether it relies on some complex Internet service etc. You can probably best judge the amount of bloat most objectively by asking the following: if our current technology instantly disappeared, how hard would it be to make this piece of technology work again? This will inevitably lead you to investigating how hard it would be to implement all the dependencies etc.

One of a very frequent questions you may hear a noob ask is "How can bloat limit software freedom if such software has a free (or "FOSS") license?" Bloat de-facto limits some of the four essential freedoms (to use, study, modify and share) required for a software to be free. A free license grants these freedoms legally, but if some of those freedoms are subsequently limited by other circumstances, the software becomes effectively less free. It is important to realize that complexity itself goes against freedom because a more complex system will inevitably reduce the number of people being able to execute freedoms such as modifying the software (the number of programmers being able to understand and modify a trivial program is much greater than the number of programmers being able to understand and modify a highly complex million LOC program). This is not any made up reason, it is actually happening and many from the free software community try to address the issue, see e.g. HyperbolaBSD policies on accepting packages which rejects a lot of popular "legally free" software on grounds of being bloat (systemd, dbus, zstd, protobuf, mono, https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:incompatible_packages). As the number of people being able to execute the basic freedom drops, we're approaching the scenario in which the software is de-facto controlled by a small number of people who can (e.g. due to the cost) effectively study, modify and maintain the program -- and a program that is controlled by a small group of people (e.g. a corporation) is by definition proprietary. If there is a web browser that has a free license but you, a lone programmer, can't afford to study it, modify it significantly and maintain it, and your friends aren't able to do that either, when the only one who can practically do this is the developer of the browser himself and perhaps a few other rich corporations that can pay dozens of full time programmers, then such browser cannot be considered free as it won't be shaped to benefit you, the user, but rather the developer, a corporation.

How much bloat can we tolerate? We are basically trying to get the most for the least price. The following diagram attempts to give an answer:

        external
       "richness"
           A   
   shiny   |    :                :
  bullshit | NO :      YES       : NO
           |    :                :                         ____. . .
   luxury  |    :                :             ___________/
           |    :                :    ________/
           |    :              __:___/
    very   |    :         ____/  :
   useful  |    :     ___/       :
           |    :  __/           :
           |    :_/              :
   useful  |   _:                :
           |  | :                :
           | /  :                :
    does   ||   :                :
   nothing +---------------------------------------------------> internal complexity
           trivial simple   solo       big      huge     gigantic
                         manageable

{ Fucking hell this shit has gone too far with the newest supershit gayme called Cities Skyline II, I literally can't anymore, apparently the game won't run smoothly even on Earth's most advanced supercomputer because, as someone analyzed, the retarddevs use billion poly models for pedestriangs without any LOD, I bet they don't even know what it is, they probably don't even know what a computer is, these must be some extra retarded soy idiots making these games now. Though I knew it would come to this and that it will be getting yet much worse, I am always still surprised, my brain refuses to believe anyone would let such a piece or monstrous shit to happen. This just can't be real anymore. ~drummyfish }

Typical Bloat

The following is a list of software usually considered a good, typical example of bloat. However keep in mind that bloat is a relative term, for example vim can be seen as a minimalist suckless editor when compared to mainstream software (IDEs), but at the same time it's pretty bloated when compared to strictly suckless programs.

  • Web since the onset of "web 2.0" has been steadily becoming more and more bloated with things such as Adobe Flash and JavaScript (and billions of its web frameworks). By today the situation about web bloat is reaching almost unbearable levels, especially in modern sites such as YouTube. For a great read see The Website Obesity Crisis.
  • Ads, spyware, DRM, anti-cheats, anti-viruses, anti-sharing, anti-repair and other anti-user "features" are bloat.
  • Desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME. The concept of a desktop environment itself is often considered bloat.
  • Windows: one of the best examples of how software should NOT be done.
  • Blender: quite useful FOSS 3D editor which however integrates things like a whole video editor, game engine, several renderers, scripting language with text editor and so on.
  • CMake: gigantic build system that currently sits on top of a sky-high sandwich of other build systems, its number of dependencies is bigger than the number of retards in observable universe (known as drummyfish's number).
  • D-Bus
  • Docker
  • Electron: GUI framework infamous for its huge resource consumption.
  • flatpak: Absolutely horrible "application distribution/execution platform???" with pakcage management, sandboxes and all that kind of shit.
  • Systemd: Huge anti-unix do-it-all system taking over GNU/Linux.
  • Virtual machines/environments/sandboxes, big abstraction sandwiches (e.g. program running in an interpreter running in a sandbox inside web browser that's running in a virtual machine that's running on an operating system).
  • Firefox, Chromium and other mainstream web browsers.
  • Java, Python and similar languages.
  • IDEs such as VSCode or NetBeans.
  • Big game engines such as Unreal, Unity or Godot.
  • Practically all commercial games made in the 21st century such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty etc.
  • pulse audio
  • office programs (e.g. M$ Office and LibreOffice) and a lot of rich text
  • Neural networks aka "AI" that is forced into everything nowadays.
  • ...

Some of these programs may be replaced with smaller bloat that basically does the same thing (e.g. produces the same output) just with less bullshit around, for example Libreoffice with Ted, Godot with Irrlicht, Firefox with badwolf etc., however many times the spectacular pompous results these programs produce just cannot essentially be reproduced by anything minimal, wanting to achieve this is really a beginner mistake, the same as wanting to achieve the "Windows experience" on a GNU system. You will never be able to make an Unreal Engine style graphics with a minimalist game engine, just like you won't be able to shoot up your school with well written poetry (in both cases the former is something bad that however most Americans want to do, the latter is something truly good they should want instead). To truly get rid of bloat one has to become able to use truly minimal programs; this means unlearning the indoctrination that "bigger results are better", one has to understand that minimal results themselves are superior AND in addition allow using superior programs (i.e. minimal ones).

Medium And Small Bloat

Besides the typical big programs that even normies admit are bloated there exists also a smaller bloat which many people don't see as such but which is nevertheless considered unnecessarily complex by some experts and/or idealists and/or hardcore minimalists, including us.

Small bloat is a subject of popular jokes such as "OMG he uses a unicode font -- BLOAT!!!". These are good jokes, it's nice to make fun out of one's own idealism. But watch out, this doesn't mean small bloat is only a joke concept at all, it plays an important role in designing good technology. When we identify something as small bloat, we don't necessarily have to completely avoid and reject that concept, we may just try to for example make it optional. In context of today's PCs using a Unicode font is not really an issue for performance, memory consumption or anything else, but we should keep in mind it may not be so on much weaker computers or for example post-collapse computers, so we should try to design systems that don't depend on Unicode.

Also remember that relatively small libraries for things that are easily done without a library, such as fixed point arithmetic, are also bloat.

Small/medium bloat includes for example:

Non-Computer Bloat

The concept of bloat can be applied even outside the computing world, e.g. to non-computer technology, art, culture, law etc. Here it becomes kind of synonymous with bullshit, but using the word bloat says we're seeing the issue from the point of view of someone acquainted with computer bloat. Examples include:

  • clothes
  • decorations (body, house, ...)
  • cars
  • using languages other than English or Esperanto
  • luxury (big house, yacht with a swimming pool, ...)
  • having electricity at home
  • ...

See Also