Started using Emacs as a replacement for many GUI environments. Nowadays, I use spreadsheets only in the classroom. Weaned myself away from Microsoft Office and LibreOffice to Latex/ Beamer for documents and presentations.Ībandoned spreadsheets and started using R data frames as spreadsheets. Switched away from Thunderbird to notmuchmail for email.Maybe I must move to Lubuntu or even Arch Linux someday. Moved from Ubuntu to Xubuntu to get rid of the bloated Gnome/ Unity desktop.Over time, I took several additional steps to reduce bloat: This began with moving from Windows to Linux, but soon I realized that modern Linux distros also contain a lot of bloat. Over the last few years, I have been moving away from bloat towards minimalism in the software that I use. I agree that the time has come to abandon bloat. We have gotten used to very sloppy design practices that are no longer viable:ĭevelopers and designers together create overweight systems in hopes that the hardware will catch up in time and cover their mistakes.Īs soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable. However, as Ceglowski points out, stagnating computing power turns software bloat into a serious problem. Maciej Ceglowski has a fascinating blog post in which he argues that the popular form of Moore’s Law (“computers always get faster and more capable”) is beginning to break down, but it does not matter because “the devices we use are becoming ‘good enough’”.
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