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less_retarded_wiki/bloat.md
Miloslav Ciz 22962b0e7e Update
2023-03-25 17:23:55 +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 (e.g. security vulnerabilities or crashes), 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 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.

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.

Back to technology though, 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 (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 sandwich of other build systems.
  • 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.
  • Neural networks aka "AI" that is forced into everything nowadays.

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.

Small 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 approaching the issue as computer programmers. Examples include: