The weirdos crusading against bloat helped keep distros light weight and performant decades on. It allowed a linux distro to fly on older hardware that was bogged down by newer linux versions. The legacy to this day is that WMs like KDE can actually be fairly light weight and there is still attention paid to not using a lot of resources.
Nowadays I feel like the complainers dont even have a consistent definition of what bloat is and it ranges from command line only users who know theyre crazy and niche but speak up anyway, to people who are just upset if a distros ships with basic default tools like an image viewer or something that opens text files or videos, or drivers.
The whole thing is also silly with how much cheaper ram and storage have gotten. Even moreso because the distro and WM isnt the limiting issue. Yes you can still run a KDE based distro with 2gigs of ram, but as soon as you open your web browser and visit the modern internet the dozen high definition images that load in and videos and javascript.
Even my supposedly “big” Ubuntu install is just 40GB. It has Wayland AND Xorg X11, multiple JDKs, Netbeans, Blender, some Games, even some snaps. My Music folder is almost as big. Together they use only 9% of my 1TB SSD. I back them up onto a 1TB USB stick.
What’s the size of your actual root though?
My root is only ~8.9GB and I have basically all the same stuff you do. Well except for snaps, those are yucky.
Yeah that was always one of the weirder sides of the Patriarchy, establishing naming conventions like the suffix -ess being female but still giving the title High Priestess of Athena Polias to a man.
It breaks immersion if the guy you hire as “weird hobo that dwells in your garden” to show off to your upper class friends is seen outside that context.
My dad worked on an assembly line making vacuum tubes. After that he was a calculator repairman for most of his life.
Calculator Repairman.
An entire life that is obsolete now. Because we no longer do much of the drudgery of assembly lines; we have machines that do it. Calculators (and other things) that used to require an entire infrastructure to keep running are now cheap and disposable.
Why can’t a high school graduate raise a family of four and buy a house? Because this isn’t that world. We’ve eliminated a lot of the jobs the middle class used to do.
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