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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, useless features 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 qualification to do.
LRS, suckless and some others 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.
Example of Bloat
- 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.
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