Comment by bityard

It's just the price of progress. When I started playing with Linux, a full fledged Linux desktop with web browser and all ran very happily on a machine with 16 megabytes of RAM. At the time, there were distributions that fit on a floppy disk.

Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.