I often hear folks in the Linux community discussing their preference for Arch (and Linux in general) because they can install only the packages they want or need - no bloat.

I’ve come across users with a couple of hundred packages installed (likely fresh installs), but I’ve also seen others with thousands.

Personally, I’m currently at 1.7k packages on my desktop and 1.3k on my laptop (both running EndeavourOS). There might be a few packages I could remove, but I don’t feel like my system is bloated.

I guess it’s subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?

I’m asking as a relatively new Linux user - been daily driving for about 7/8 months

  • SuperSpruce
    1·
    6 months ago

    When there is bloated software eating more CPU and RAM than necessary.

    If a simple text editor takes up 100MB RAM, then it’s bloated, even if a 1GB game isn’t.

    Here’s an aside: Unless there’s a very good reason not to, we should all be designing software to run on 5%ile hardware (on a global scale) with reasonable performance. That text article should be loaded in under 5 seconds, not 30 seconds, on a quad core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 system. If you can ensure this, then it’ll be blazing fast on modern hardware.