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?"

Comments

At a little over a meg...

[pieaholicx]

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?

Vi

[teknopurge]

QED.

Re:Vi

[gstoddart]

vi ...QED.

As long as we're only talking about old-skool vi, I totally agree with you.

Some of these wonky new vi's with their fancy colouring and extra modes which coincide with legacy vi commands are evil. I've been using vi for almost 20 years -- and when I find myself in a new vi in a mode I don't know where I am, something has gone horribly wrong. If you're going to add modes and stuff, make sure that there is no bloody legacy vi command you've screwed up.

There's nothing more sad than watching a guy who got coddled with emacs all through school suddenly finding himself on a customer site on a machine which only has an old-fashioned vi. They can't do anything, then they're asking the Solaris admin to install some software so he can do something simple.

Everyone should be at least a little familiar with vi. When the fit hits the shan, sometimes it's all you've got to get out of the doo doo.

Cheers

I've got a summary

[realdodgeman]

I would guess that whatever your favorite non-bloat software is, it is most likely in Damn Small Linux...

Re:I've got a summary

[BiggerIsBetter]

I would guess that whatever your favorite non-bloat software is, it is most likely in Damn Small Linux... Which suggests that Damn Small Linux is, well, somewhat bloated.

uTorrent

[Telvin_3d]

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.

Re:uTorrent

[burris]

Just because it is small and efficient doesn't mean it is written well. Small and efficient are just two possible goals when writing software. A lot of very ugly hacks were used to make uTorrent so micro. That means it misses the mark on other possible goals like maintainability and portability.

Not an "application"

[Otter]

It's not quite an "application" but: WindowMaker. Unbloated in every sense.

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.

Re:Foxit

[GoatEnigma]

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!

My favs

[crt]

• Ultra-Edit for text editing. Tons of features but still starts & runs fast. 10MB download, ~10MB ram.
• ACDSee for image viewing. I run an ancient version, so I don't know if the new ones are more bloated.
• Jungle Disk for storage and backup, 1.5MB Win download (4.5MB mac), ~12MB ram. Mozy uses about 30MB.

Re:Weird criteria

[kryptkpr]

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.

Re:Lynx?

[Realistic_Dragon]

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).

Re:Oh!

[baryon351]

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.

Re:Oh!

[DrSkwid]

What's the joke ?

I use ed at least once a week, if not more.

Re:Weird criteria

[truesaer]

Even with 2GB of memory my system still feels sluggish, because everyone in the world thinks their software needs to run as a service or have some persistent background process eating up memory. 5-10MB of memory times a zillion apps and suddenly your computer is slow.

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.

Re:Oh!

[dknj]

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.

Re:GIMP tile cache size

[fossa]

Is there a compelling reason that the default behavior is not 80% of your available memory?

Re:Is it just me?

[swordgeek]

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.

Re:Perl

[Lobster Quadrille]

I have written a lot of perl applications where I didn't need regular expressions for example, but that library was included by default.

If you wrote a perl app without regexes, you probably did it wrong ;)

Re:Weird criteria

[kryptkpr]

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.

Re:Oh!

[PopeRatzo]

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!