#softwarebloat

2025-06-06

When did the Debian netinst iso get so big? I'm sure it used to be about 200MB. Now it's almost 700MB
#SoftwareBloat

Can I code on a Raspberry Pi?
💻 From Raspberry Pi Dreams to Coding Nightmares 🧠

I recently migrated all my native Java executables from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 to my home server. One machine to rule them all. With the Pi now free, I dared to ask: "Could it serve as a desktop?"
Spoiler: No. Not even close.

After soldering proper connectors (because micro USB is now the tech version of a fossil), I powered it up. Not to code. Just to open a browser.

It failed. Spectacularly.

Apparently, launching a modern browser now requires a minimum of 1GB RAM and the will of a dying star. Dear frontend framework fans: maybe stop shipping entire JS ecosystems just to render a button. You're not curing cancer. Less is more.

Irony? The Pi still serves as a server, solid, silent, reliable. But opening a single webpage? That’s where it draws the line. My other Pi models are bulkier veterans. They used to work as desktop machines. Now? They drown in memory and I/O demands like kittens in a tsunami of bloated software.

Speaking of I/O, let’s talk coding:
Tools like Gradle will kill your SD card faster than you will to debug XML.
IDE's and all the modern crap survives long enough to say goodbye as they are bloatware, not software. If I had time, I would rewrite all the tools.

I tried expensive SD cards. They all broke. Modern tools have no mercy.
And the shiny new Raspberry Pi 500? Still runs off an SD card.
Beautiful concept. Terrible choice for our terrible software performance.

Yet, I admire it. The idea that a computer fits in a keyboard, Keyboard computers are cyberpunk incarnate.
Imagine cramming a MacBook Air's logic board into a mechanical shell.
No fan. No nonsense. Just cool, portable silicon nirvana and a clean desk everywhere.

If only our software wasn't a bloated mass of lazy abstractions, we could actually use these machines. But AI's coming for us and it was trained on this mess.

So here I am, dreaming of turning my old MacBook Air into a keyboard-only cyberdeck. Who needs a screen when you’ve got a home office? Who needs a webcam when your phone stalks you from five angles?

Apple take notes: Give us something like a Pi.

#RaspberryPi #Coding #SoftwareBloat #EdgeComputing #DevLife #Minimalism #FrontendMadness

Raspberry Pi 500 Keyboard Computer
N-gated Hacker Newsngate
2025-05-02

🚀 Oh joy, a that proves estimates, because who needs human logic when you can have more software bloat? 🙄 Terence Tao bravely steps where no mathematician has gone before: the painfully obvious. Stay tuned for more riveting ... or not. 💤
terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/05

Misinformation-SuperhighwaymanDamienWise@aus.social
2025-02-21

Microsoft is paywalling these features in Notepad and Paint
pcworld.com/article/2614943/mi

For decades, Notepad and Paint have been the epitome of "keep it simple" in software design: lightweight application, minimum feature-set, no bells-and-whistles, you can rely on it to get the job done well, doesn't have any UI/UX clutter, and no design-change drama for years.

The bad news: Practically every Tech company these days is trying to cram AI into everything. Microsoft recently started adding bloat to Notepad and Paint by integrating OpenAI nonsense such as Dall-E.

Now for the good news: Microsoft is hiding all that AI garbage behind a paywall.

#Microsoft #SoftwareBloat #AI #OpenAI #DallE

Andrew Abdalianabdalian@lingo.lol
2025-01-30

To be more than fair, Office 2004 has some shared files (fonts, help files, etc.) that it stores outside the application bundles. I don't know how many fonts Office 365 came with—or how much space they're taking up—but the total size of the entire Office 2004 folder is 554 MB. That's including things like templates, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger.

#Microsoft #SoftwareBloat

Microsoft Office 2004
Modified: October 5, 2005 at 3:57 PM
553.6 MB
Andrew Abdalianabdalian@lingo.lol
2025-01-30

How far we've come in 20 years…

164x the size. An average growth of 445 MB per year.

#Microsoft #SoftwareBloat

A list view of applications from Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and their sizes:

Microsoft Entourage	11.2 MB
Microsoft Excel		15.3 MB
Microsoft PowerPoint	8.8 MB
Microsoft Word		20.4 MBA list of current applications from Microsoft Office 365 and their sizes:

Microsoft Excel 		2.2 GB 
Microsoft OneNote 	1.22 GB
Microsoft Outlook	2.51 GB
Microsoft PowerPoint	1.88 GB
Microsoft Word		2.41 GB
2024-12-20

Building Perl 5 natively has been running for 2 days on OMAP1 w/32MB RAM, so I decided to look if there's something to optimize... It used to finish within a day. The compilation seems to proceed well, it's just slow because of swapping.

GCC 12.4 cc1 binary alone is around 22 megs. If I compile it with -Oz it shrinks almost 4 megs! On other binaries (like binutils) difference is not that big but still measurable. Going to check if this helps.

#Linux #ARM #SoftwareBloat #LowEnd #Hobbyist

2024-08-25

Why is a basic app for syncing a smartwatch SIX HUNDRED MEGABYTES?! #garmin #bloat #softwarebloat

620MB update for a simple Garmin app.
Thomas Frans 🇺🇦thomy2000@fosstodon.org
2024-05-02

Yet another program that adds stories for no reason whatsoever. Repeat after me:

"Not every program needs stories."

#Firefox #Mozilla #stories #SoftwareBloat #bloat

Firefox new tab with stories. There are nine stories with images and some summary text.
2024-04-16

On the bright side, at least #Microsoft is *dependably* bad.

I just don't get it. How can they be so incompetent? This isn't a one-off issue, either. #bloatware #softwareBloat

Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook taking up a rather ridiculous amount of memoryMicrosoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook taking up a rather ridiculous amount of memory
2024-02-19

Note to self: don't add #TensorflowJS sentiment analysis to a static Vue app, even if it's just for experimentation/self-education.

All it does is add an extra 10 seconds onto the page load time for little practical gain.

#derp #softwareDev #softwareBloat

A screenshot from a Lighthouse report showing the "Minimise main-thread work" and "Reduce JavaScript execution time" adding up to 13.8 and 10.0 seconds, respectively.

These are bad. They mean the page is taking a while to load.A screenshot from a Lighthouse report showing the "Minimise main-thread work" and "Reduce JavaScript execution time" adding up to 0.4 seconds and 0.1 seconds.

These are times you'd barely notice - practically instant, meaning the page has fully loaded almost instantly.

Every time I download a gigabyte-sized update for a software that solves one simple problem, I think the exact same thing: "The world is shipping far too much code..." #softwareBloat

Nice article by @bert_hubert: spectrum.ieee.org/lean-softwar

2024-02-17

My Gmail tab in Safari is currently claiming to use about 15000 Apple II equivalents of RAM. This is fine. 🔥

#SoftwareBloat

2024-02-12

„This is the existential crisis facing the software industry today, and it has no good answers.“

from theregister.com/2024/02/12/dro

Worth a read.
#fosdem #software #softwarebloat

Norobiik @Norobiik@noc.socialNorobiik@noc.social
2024-02-12

#GoogleChrome is about 40 million lines, which is about the same size as the #Linux kernel.

Nobody can read the #SourceCode of Chrome. Not alone, not as a team. A thousand people working for a decade couldn't read the entire thing.

And the computers that run the #code aren't much faster now than they were a decade ago. #SoftwareBloat #KoomeysLaw

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing #codebases
go.theregister.com/feed/www.th

2024-01-31

macOS Sonoma is a 13.37GB download.

That’s 15.5 times larger than Arch Linux…

Over 6.5 times larger than EndeavourOS
Over 5 times larger than Garuda, Linux Mint, Feren OS, Pop!_OS, Fedora, & Zorin
Over 3 times larger than Ubuntu, Manjaro & Debian

Over 2.4 times larger than…WINDOWS 11‽

Are you feeling okay, Tim Apple?

#Linux #macOS #Windows #SoftwareBloat

macOS Ventura System Settings app on the Software Update screen, showing the upgrade to macOS Sonoma
2024-01-30

Been thinking about software bloat (and Zawinski's law), particularly with browsers, and had an idea.

The promise of add-ons was that we could have a lean core and then whatever additional functionality we wanted could be customised. In reality, most users probably have 1-2 add-ons and we can't expect most people to trawl through software repositories just trying to get their browser to do what they would consider to be "simple stuff".

But what if browsers were more like distros? No one expects Linux, GNU/Linux, or even say Debian to meet the needs of most users as-is or for most users to select all the various software packages necessary to bring it up to that they need.

We could have a Gecko/Firefox core and then different browser distros could select a set of add-ons that make it functional in a particular way. That way, each browser distro could make sure that the set of add-ons worked together and met the needs of their particular user base.

And in Linux land, Linux distros could include their particular browser distro tailored to their intended audience.

#browsers #firefox #SoftwareBloat #IdleThoughts #FOSS

2023-12-06

The Power Macintosh 6500’s software bundle sure loaded a lot of extensions 😬

#apple #macintosh #powermacintosh
#retrocomputing #vintagemac
#softwarebloat

2023-01-07

NodeJS (19.4) won't build on my laptop using homebrew anymore because it's running out of disk space.

I have 13.6 GB free space. 🤦

#NodeJS #ModernSoftware #bloatware #SoftwareBloat #BloatyMcBloatface

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