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less_retarded_wiki/bloat.md
Miloslav Ciz 58d560ffd4 Update
2022-11-12 15:49:22 +01:00

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Bloat

Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of software and technology means extreme growth in terms of source code size, complexity, number of dependencies, redundancy, unnecessary or useless features (e.g. feature creep) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs and security vulnerabilities, as well as loss of freedom, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at it worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to capitalism, commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people 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, safe, 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.

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 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). 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.

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. 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-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 stands above other build systems (lol)
  • Electron: GUI framework infamous for its huge resource consumption
  • 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
  • neural networks aka "AI"

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 are nevertheless considered unnecessarily complex by some experts and/or idealists and hardcore minimalists, including us. This includes for example: