The article:

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url was:"http://www.osnews.com/story/7324/The_Fast-Food_Syndrome_The_Linux_Platform_is_Getting_Fat/page2/"
linktext was:"http://www.osnews.com/story/7324/The_Fa ... Fat/page2/"
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The comments:

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url was:"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/10/1246219"
linktext was:"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/10/1246219"
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The article is from 2004, just before Puppy Linux and antiX Linux were started. I see that people have been criticizing Linux for bloated operation for years. Although Ubuntu and Fedora were considerably lighter back then than is the case today, so was the current Windows OS, and the computers available just 6 years ago were also considerably slower.

I didn't start using Linux until 2007, so it's interesting for me to see what things were like in the years before I became a penguin. It's nice to see that Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, and antiX Linux have since addressed the complaints about bloatware. I have used all three of these distros as my main distro. I now use antiX Linux as my main distro and Puppy Linux as my backup distro but have stopped using Damn Small Linux.

Interesting article. As usual, the slashdot comments are priceless. The technical discussion shows how difficult it is to define bloat and make comparisons about speed. In my case, I've had Damn Small running on an ancient Compaq with only 28MB of RAM. Some apps ran just fine, but surfing was pointless except with text browsers.

I need to run several Windows apps that do okay with Wine but for fun I dedicated the Compaq to running just Windows software. So I got rid of Damn Small and put on Windows 98 and all my Microsoft apps. The truth is, that machine runs Win98 perfectly well on those specs and all the apps run fast. I put on an old version of Opera and even websurfing, in a pinch, works fine. No other version of Linux would boot on that machine, and I'm pretty sure Damn Small has gone inactive now.

I'm not sure what the point of my experience is. I doubt there's any virtue in keeping boxes with *that* level of minimal power running. I don't really have to use it for running Windows (Wine does a good enough job most of the time). Lots of the new"base" versions of Linux would handle a system with just a little more oomph than the ancient Compaq. I guess the one area where Windows trumps Linux is in keeping *very* old boxes grinding away.

What this means for the bloat issue now, I have no idea.

I use anitx on an old PII. It still run's resonable well and lets me have modern apps.

Win98 might run faster, but for me I would be stuck in that range of software. I am glad antix gives life to this old beast.

Trimming back the bloat to run on these relics at some point becomes hard to support.

Just like in Windows, the drive to make the desktop do more and look prettier adds to bloat. The feature creep is inevitable.

Trying to put powerful features at the users finger tips, while hiding the underlying complexity of the code involved requires computing beefiness.

Fortunetly Linux allows some customization, so at least you can set the balance you would wish between the feautres with bloat and the ones you wish to streamline.