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Comment by cogman10

3 days ago

My 5 year old laptop runs a lot faster as well.

Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. The UX isn't terribly worse on fairly old hardware.

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cogman10

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MarsIronPI  3 days ago

> Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. I think it's more that it was designed in the 80s-90s for hardware at the time, and hasn't added bloat or "requirements" since then. So as computers have gotten more capable Linux takes less of the overall capacity.

immibis  3 days ago

Linux has plenty of bloat. But it's your bloat. You get the power to slice through it how you want and nobody will stop you.

  • cogman10  3 days ago

    Well, I'd say it's almost the reverse of how it is with windows.

    In windows, the bloat is built in by default. You don't get to chose how the start menu works, you get the windows default start menu and you better like the ads in it. It takes work to pull that garbage out.

    In linux most stuff is opt in.

    The other part of linux is most stuff isn't simply there running in the background by default. Firefox eats a decent amount of memory, but it's not doing that when I don't have my browser open.

    • immibis  2 days ago

      Any Linux distribution comes with a lot of bloat, which is why it requires 30GB or so, rather than 30MB or so. Even the kernel is much bigger than it once was.

      Nobody is yelling at you not to remove it, or trying to prevent you from removing it, or obscuring where it is and cross-linking everything to make it harder to remove, but it's still there and requires substantial work to remove, just like in Windows.

smallstepforman  3 days ago

Quote: very little bloat over the years

You should try Haiku, and read about its package virtual file system, Linux in comparison will forever after that look like a bloated hog.