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Name Your Favorite Bloat-Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible. I can't stand bloated software like iTunes, as compared to Foobar or classic Winamp; or Windows Media Player, as compared to VLC or Media Player Classic. What are some of your favorite applications which are a little less bloated?"
PuTTy is my clear cut winner. A little over a meg for a full installer with all the bells and whistles, what's not to love?
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QED.
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I would guess that whatever your favorite non-bloat software is, it is most likely in Damn Small Linux...
uTorrent is one of the cleanest, smallest, most efficient pieces of software I have ever had the pleasure to use. Since switching to OSX a few months ago (I bought a Macbook Pro planning to run XP, and the switch just seemed to happen), my one real regret is that uTorrent is Windows only. I've been reduced to using Azureus, which gets the job done, but is horribly bloated.
So, my nomination is for uTorrent, and if anyone knows of a similar package for OSX I would love to hear it.
Also, as the rest of modern desktop Linux has bloated to the point where Konsole and Gnome Terminal aren't bottlenecks any more I've moved away from it in favor of tabs, but I used to only use rxvt instead of heavier alternatives. Gnome Terminal in particular used to have visible lag, and I'm a lot more tolerant of that stuff in a multimedia app than in a freaking shell.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
iTunes is great if your music collection is well-tagged and well-organized. However, the average user has a bunch of crap downloaded from Kazaa that they've just thrown into folders for makeshift playlists. If they want to correct the metadata, they rename the file. Meaning the actual tags are less accurate than the filename. For these people iTunes is a huge, confusing hassle and most people I've setup with iPods would be happier with the option to drag-and-drop through Explorer. Few people take the time to properly tag their files.
Absolutely the best de-bloating move I ever made. I was so sick of Adobe's Reader phoning home, downloading slower and slower updates with more crap, crashing my web browsers, and generally taking 30+ seconds to start up. If you've never heard of Foxit reader, I strongly recommend it!
I must respectfully disagree.
I absolutely abhor the iTunes interface. It is 2nd last on my list of good music management programs, one small notch above Music Match Jukebox. Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways which for some reason involve playlists. I gave up after half an hour and just installed RockBox on my Nano so I could be free from it's horrors.
I would imagine that iTunes is great for the casual user that doesn't need nor want much MANUAL control over their music library, but for more advanced users the non-standard UI (on Windows) and strange "simplified" ways of doing simple things make it near useless.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Ever tried it with Slashdot? The *light* version of the front page is 600k!
The only alternative is the mobile interface, which is horribly crippled (top five comments only? the only good thing about slashdot is the comments!).
The content on Slashdot *should* be ideal for reading on the way to work on my mobile - content that can be laid out easily in a linear fashion, lots of content on a single page so I can keep on reading through blackspots, no pictures - but the way it's laid out makes it way too annoying (and this is with an unlimited 3G data plan).
Beep beep.
I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible
I'll have to go out on a limb and say I dropped expectations of absolutely minimal HD and RAM space for EVERY app I use, after continually coming up against programs that would go all out in being light in resource use, but couldn't do their job because of it.
Some are just what the original poster ordered - vim is certainly one of the good cases, it's powerful and manages a light footprint, and there are plenty of other tools that do phenomenal work whether it's running on eight xeons, or a single low-end 386.
One of the opposite cases is some forms of image work when comparing apps like Gimp and Photoshop. In some areas, Gimp is WAY lighter on resource use. I'd perform work on 250MB image, and gimp would use little more RAM than that, no matter how it was configured for RAM use. This would normally be seen as a really good thing for Gimp.
What of Photoshop? It wanted 2GB of RAM to work at maximum speed. That might sound like serious bloat on photoshop's part, but when working on large images it meant two orders of magnitude difference in speed. Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
(That doesn't mean PS was incapable when stuck with ONLY 256MB RAM. Then it'd bog down just like Gimp)
What I want are apps that use the resources I provide them *wisely*. There's more to that than just being totally frugal. Seen too many people running big-RAM systems and being proud of having their OS use just a hundred or two MB out of gigs. Why? Resources are free once they're installed, may as well use them when they genuinely can help you work.
What's the joke ?
I use ed at least once a week, if not more.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Why does iTunes have to have like 3 services running on my computer at all times? Its absurd. iTunes is not user friendly either, it just seems that way because other media players are even worse.
Are you going for +5, Funny? OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird? Why don't you compare them with Opera and KOffice and then tell me they aren't bloated?
Some code is just bloated, but most of the author's examples are not in that category.
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I would imagine that iTunes is great for the casual user that doesn't need nor want much MANUAL control over their music library
/. it's like they learn *one* way to do something and will fight until they die to only do it that way because it most obviously has to be the best.
Give it up!
Manual control of the library was great, when it was actually needed back in the 90s. What on Earth do people honestly believe they still need manual control for? To find the files? They are placed in a very logical structure. For splitting a huge library across mulitlpe locations? Use symlinks.
Bitching about needing manual control is like bitching about your car having an electric starter. It's quant... and sad at the same time.
I've never quite understood the tech luddites on
--- I do not moderate.
It seems a bit strange to call someone a clueless dweeb just because they've chosen to award some karma to someone who posted something funny. But I'll be charitable and assume you were attempting some sort of weird ironic criticism of that quirk of the moderation system, rather than being a clueless dweeb yourself.
A great way to DoS a server remotely!
doubt it. ever heard of ulimit? any self-respecting unix admin worth salt would limit resources to unprivileged users/applications on their production servers.
Is there a compelling reason that the default behavior is not 80% of your available memory?
PICO!
For one thing, it's the fastest way to end a vi vs emacs argument. I've never seen two warring parties unite against an aspiring geek so fast.
I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible.
I'm not really sure what this means. Do you prefer as little hard drive and RAM use as possible because you're running your life on a hacked Apple IIe? Or do you prefer hard drive and RAM efficiency because you use a honkin' desktop machine but like to keep a dozen apps open and working at once? Or is it really just an aesthetic preference, a form of minimalism ("I wear a loincloth, but I draw the line there. Sandals are for whimps.")?
Personally I'm less interested in RAM or hard drive use per se, and much more concerned with operational efficiency. At the human interaction level, does an app let me do what I need to do easily and intuitively, without getting in my way? Does it force me to learn its intricacies, which are then not transferrable to other apps? Or does it anticipate my needs in a non-intrusive way? To me the most efficient apps are the ones where I think, "Hmm.. I wonder if it does *this*?" Sure enough, it does.
My preference is for small, sharp apps that only do a few things, but do them well. They execute quickly, are a pleasure to work in (without calling attention to themselves), and are intuitive to use.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's not just you--in fact, it's far too many of "you," and you're wrong.
There are two reasons for bloat: Accidental (i.e. shitty programming) and deliberate (adding pointless features.) By buying into the "let's just throw money at it until the problem goes away" mentality, you're encouraging bad programming and endless marketing-driven upgrades. It's a hundred bucks on RAM now, another hundred on a new hard drive, and then next year it'll be a new CPU. You're going to end up spending about $500-1000 per year on maintaining the same level of productivity as you've always had. This is key!
Windows 2000 required a 133MHz processor and 64MB RAM.
Windows XP required a 233MHz processor and 128MB RAM. The ONLY FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE between them was the thumbnail view mode. Everything else was eyecandy and toys, but it wasn't a huge upgrade cost.
Windows Vista requires a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, a DirectX 9-compliant video card, and an internet connection. Oh yeah, and TEN TIMES as much disk space. Now what extra value does Vista provide to you, the end customer? What advantage does Vista give you over XP?
Consider Office suites. Office 97 ran on a 486, with 12MB RAM for all features. Office 2007 now requires a 500MHz processor and 256MB RAM, and contains very few features that weren't already in Office 97. Moreso, only a tiny fraction of those features are actually used by any appreciable chunk of the population.
The ONLY REASON to keep writing bloated software is to make you constantly spend more money staying exactly where you are, and your answer is to reward them by spending that money. Bloatware is capitalism gone wrong. It's forced consumption (and the forced aspect is getting worse with OSes now requiring online license activation and continued polling), and so much of the population is EAGER beyond words to consume while getting no value.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Organization happens automatically, with iTunes.
I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. I believe this to be the main reason why myself and others like me (I see a few in this thread) loathe it. I want to be able to organize my music myself in a way that makes sense to me (and often, only me).
I don't consider this to be a waste of time at all, as I enjoy the occasional walk through my library to add new music or re-discover old favorites.
In the end, I think to each his own. iTunes is simply not for everyone and neither is any other piece of software, be it made by Apple or not.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Hats off to NSIS for being a full-blown installer with some 40 KB overhead. I worship its having delivered me from the clutches of the evil InstallShield (remember when apps were 50KB and the setup 2 MB?) Justin Frankel is a genius.
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Instead of utilities, I'll list some media production apps:
Steinberg Wavelab (audio editor)
Reaper (DAW)
DVDFab Platinum
I'm not a programmer, so I can't testify to the efficiency of the code or anything, but I use every single one of the features of the above programs. By that measure, it makes them the opposite of bloatware.
Here's one that I just downloaded today, after being prompted by an earlier Slashdot article:
Opera 9.5 (I've been using it for less than an hour and it's already my favorite browser). Maybe there's some bloat somewhere in Opera. Maybe there are some of you fiber-eaters who believe that being able to render javascript automatically makes it bloatware. But this bitch is FAST and it seemed to install in the time it took me to click the FINISH button.
And finally, my favorite, slick tool for breaching the walls of the Corrupt Castle of the Copyright Cabal...uTorrent! It's more than just a torrent download manager, it's a weapon for fighting fascism!
You are welcome on my lawn.
And basically I find it really annoying in perl that that extra functionality is built in to the language via a disorganized mishmash of global variables with ridiculous names and extra operators.
Why do I have to have those things present in the process and the namespace of my program if I'm not using them?
Clearly your metric of using oreilly quick reference docs to gauge language bloat is wrong.
And once you learn python (or whatever language) and the libraries you need, you don't need reference books to remember what variables like "$]" means.
CD ripping: abcde. Easy to control and customize.
Text editor: vim Yes, it is bigger than, say, nvi. But on most any machine, it usually runs lightning fast.
Shell: zsh. Not one of the smallest CLI shells, but very capable and well-documented. In many ways, easier to use than any GUI shell (and much lighter compared to any GUI shell.)
Calculator: command-line wcalc
Finances: Ledger whips everything I have ever tried; I would never switch to a GUI program for this again.
Lists and databases: colon-delimeted plain text files. Search and get records with awk or grep. Quicker and easier than spreadsheets, and I could (should) easily encrypt them with GPG.
Nutrition tracking: see sig (immodestly)
Task tracking: todo.txt
Photo sorting: just use GNOME's Nautilus and folders; all the photo album apps seem to be too much trouble. Wrote a zsh script to pull photos from memory cards, rename them so I know what camera they came from, rotate them, and dump them into a hard-drive folder so I can sort them out.
Light doesn't always pay: I got tired of trying to configure Fluxbox and Gentoo; now I'm on GNOME and Ubuntu. Light also doesn't pay for things done infrequently, as light often comes with a bigger learning curve. I usually resort to GUI tools to, for example, add users to the system.
I wish I could find a good CLI audio player--full featured, but CLI. MPD seems to come closest, but it can't get me away from Amarok. Similarly, GNUpod is pretty good for ipods, but I move stuff in and out of my iPod fairly rarely so I found Amarok is just easier to use.
Penny - plain text accounting
Google Docs and Spreadsheets. They take up no hard drive space beyond what I'm already using for Firefox.
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