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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?"
I know it's a bit crap, but I must confess to quite liking MS Paint for it's simplicity. When all you need is to crop a screendump and save it as a JPG, nothing beats it!
Other than that, I'd second the VLC and Winamp combo. Ever since there has been iPod support in Winamp (via a plugin or 'out of the box') I haven't used anything else.
Especially in an era of 500gb HDs and 2GB of RAM.
My criteria are usability, utility, and functionality. For that reason iTunes is second on my list, with WinAMP all the way down at the bottom of 50. iPhoto recently shot up to #1 due to it's Web Gallery feature: Select an event, publish, and then edit the gallery at your leisure. The gallery is updated on the website "behind the scenes", so you never need to synchronize or revisit it, it's all done automatically.
iTunes is high on that list for a similar reason. Set up a few "Smart Playlists", and music is automatically added or removed from my queue as necessary depending on playcount, on ranking, on genre, or new additions. I never need to do anything except insert a CD, vote up or down my like of any particular song at the moment, or plug in my iPod.
Gives me more time to do other things... like rollerblading, taking pictures, or talking to people.
GPL Deconstructed
It has to be one of the most useful personal documentation, note taking tools in existence. It's basically a wiki for the desktop. All the information is stored in wiki style text files so even if you want to switch to something else, it's easy.
o jects/zim/index.shtml
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pr
Deleted
I like dwm, it's a rather tiny and simple window manager. Watching their mailing list is entertaining at times, the amount of effort invested in deleting lines of code is pretty impressive.
http://www.suckless.org/wiki/dwm
The tarball for it is only 19k, and doing a wc -l on all the *.c files gives 1781 lines. RSS on my system right now is only 1336K, which is smaller than a single bash shell. Probably not something someone infatuated with glittery stuff would like to run but it's definitely a small program.
Doesn't get much more bloat free than that.
Konqueror.
No, seriously.
Before my Clamshell iBook (running Gentoo Linux) died, my alternatives for web browsing were Konqueror and Firefox. I found that, despite the heaviness of qt versus gtk+, Konqueror was much nicer than Firefox in terms of both memory and CPU usage. (Opera was on par with Konqueror but... it gave me the creeps to use, I don't know why.)
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
I like Opera, modo, foobar2000, VLC Media Player, 7zip, Pidgin, Process Explorer, uTorrent, TCPView, Foxit Reader, and WinDirStat.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
What's really fun is reading your email by telnetting to port 110.
/dev/null over the mailbox file, though customers tended to frown on that for some reason.
I actually used to do this a lot when I was working for a certain ISP that had very flaky homebrew mail software. Mailboxes were getting corrupted all the time. The only way to fix them was to telnet in and fiddle. Or just copy
Perl is my favorite unbloated language. I know you laugh but hear me out. Pick up the O-reily quick reference for almost any major language. with the exception of fortran (:-) the perl one is not just a little bit thinner, it's more than half as thick as most and that includes c++.
Basically I find it really annoying that to get even a fraction of the functionality of stock perl one has to import some library. Why do I have to import Regular expression or Strings in python? or for that matter, just to get the command line args I have to import a freakin library? And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
I don't want to rag on python here and this is not a flame to say perl is better than python. (python is in very many ways superior to perl for organized project programming. It also used to be easier to read since there was only one way to do something but that zen is gone now.)
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. Just the manpages or a quick reference will do. I hate language bloat.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
That can be merely copied to your drive(ala Mac) or even run from a thumb drive. That includes, but not limited to, Seamonkey, Filezilla, Audacity, Miranda, VirtualDub, TightVNC, Exact Audio Copy, Slax (or probably any liveCD). I generally try to avoid anything that actually requires installation, especially anything that places or replaces files anywhere in the system(Windows) directory. I don't care if I have duplicate dll's. I just want the convenience of being able to toss the program into the trash if I no longer need it.
What?
on the older classic OS, I always liked iCab browser and Soundjam MP3 player. Small, worked very well, I still use them on the odd occasion I have to use my old powerbook.
On linux, the mini OS distros,damn small, puppy, slax, austrumi, etc. proving you can have a decent functional desktop with a variety of useful applications in only 50 megs of space. You don't need hundreds of megs on a CD or an entire DVD with gigs of stuff, most of which most normal users will never use anyway. Browser, chat, email, media player, some sort of text editor, done.
Windows, no idea, haven't used it since 98se, which could run on some pretty marginally specced machines.
AbiWord does hardly depend on GNOME. We have only 1 dependency with GNOME in the name, and that is libgnomeprint (libgnomeprint only depends on gnomecanvas, which in turn depends on nothing GNOMEy).
And this ofcourse only holds for the Linux version, not for our native Windows version for example.
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.
The simple point you're making: Hardware is for us to USE, not "NOT USE". Sure, we don't want our applications to be completely wasteful. But if software developers can focus more on useful features and code with less bugs, I'd rather they do that than save a few megs of RAM.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Calendar.com -- 896 bytes, displays the calendar for any month.
C:\Bin>dir calendar.com
Volume in drive C is XPPro
Volume Serial Number is 5851-2646
Directory of C:\Bin
10/13/2006 11:46 PM 896 Calendar.com
1 File(s) 896 bytes
0 Dir(s) 23,780,888,576 bytes free
C:\Bin>calendar
September 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
C:\Bin>calendar nov 1963
November 1963
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
C:\Bin>
Some people complain of bloat as what they think are useless features. Others think of bloat in terms of memory footprint, disk usage, or performance and their priority often depends on the task ahead.
One example I can think of is Opera VS Firefox. If you read the comments around any Opera story around here, you'll notice how some FF fans will say that Opera is bloated despite its speed and smaller footprint. At the same time, those who use Opera will complain about FF's memory leaks and its bugging down with huge pages.
Among the examples cited by the story's submitter, I prefer Media Player Classic because it's faster while providing better image quality. There's also Notepad++ as an alternative PHP/ASP.net/HTML editor and XnView for image management and conversion. I also like Amarok and WinAmp. Although they're not light applications, I prefer them over iTunes.
You think ed is bloated? /usr/bin/yes takes a whopping 34K on OSX. What in the name of all that is good and right in this world is Steve Jobs doing with my CPU cycles inside of /usr/bin/yes? On my old DOS box I probably could have done this in a few lines of assembly.
main() { write(1, "hello, world", 12); }
Even though I'm (at least mostly) joking, the difference is real, and at one time would have given serious consideration to doing things this way in real code. In reality, you've shown exactly how a lot of bloat really happens. Much of it stems from people using large, general-purpose libraries where they didn't really need them. In some cases (including this one) they didn't really even gain much from the library. The C stdio library provides buffering that can help speed when/if it reduces the number of times your program calls the OS write routine. In this case, the code calls write exactly once either way, so it's gained you nothing, but cost you extra memory usage and data copying, as well as making your program quite a bit larger.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
>Ever tried it with Slashdot? The *light* version of the front page is 600k!
Weird, I go to the *normal* front page, click Document Size on Firefoxes Web Developer add-on, and this is the result:
Documents (1 file) 15 KB (67 KB uncompressed)
Images (34 files) 31 KB
Objects (0 files)
Scripts (4 files) 68 KB (290 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (3 files) 36 KB
Total 150 KB (424 KB uncompressed)
So where's your extra 176KB in the light version, and does Lynx have gzip support?
No, they would merely reject any patches on one of the spurious grounds you have noted above: that the submitter had not fixed the problem on Irix (so they would refuse to fix it for 99% of users), or the patch would make things worse on multi-user systems (so they would refuse to fix it for 80% of users), or the submitter had not proven beyond a shadow of doubt that he had found a completely optimal strategy (so they would refuse to make it considerably better). Let's be honest - the GIMP developers do not care about end users, they only care about massaging their own egos and pretending that GIMP is a serious competitor to Photoshop.
Man, I thought the same thing. It took me a long time to understand why anyone would want windows when you had XTree gold. It was a beautiful application. Capable of reading all kinds of files (even autocad dwg!), searching was powerful. You could tag a bunch of files based on name, grep those files for some text, untagging the ones that didn't match as it went and reducing your search.
Pure Beauty, I haven't used it in many, many years, but I bet my fingers would remember the keys in 5 minutes of using it again.
I also remember the things that finally killed it for me. Lack (or late) support for long filenames, and the terrible windows port... man, those people should *have* written windows!
Is there a linux port?
It only runs in Mac Classic, but at 400k, the web browser Wannabe is a very cool app. Extremely fast at loading pages. It displays only text, converting images (ads, etc.) to urls or saving them to disk. I really wish the author would open-source it for a port to OS X and other systems.
Blender
Measured in features compared to other programms of the same type, Blender is easyly the most bloat-free software ever. Version 2.0 fit on two 3.5" HD Disks and had an incredible featureset. The GUI uses OpenGL and is blazingly fast compared to other 3D progamms. It has gotten larger (ca. 10MB to download) but still beats others hands down.
Emacs
Once the most bloated piece of software in existance, Emacs now is the leanest Work enviroment available with the most power. After 10 years I've finally started to learn Emacs and it's all I expected it to be. Usage and control is far-out bizar at some points (marking a section takes several steps that are so counter intuitive it's unbelievable) but the power and available featureset is impressive.
Fluxbox
My favorite non-bloat Window Manager on X. Fast, neat and unique features, looks good. My prime choice for non-KDE/Gnome setups.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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Thank God for evolution.
$ file `which yes` /usr/bin/yes: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures
it's a universal binary.
<i>frankly, the colors hurt my eyes.</i>
:syn off
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
There are security updates to cat?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Ah yes, I did that the other day. I was configuring a support email address inbox with a program I wasn't familiar with and I wasn't certain if it was leaving the mail on the server or not. I couldn't figure any good way to determine from the GUI where a particular message was stored so I just telnetted in and did a list. That confirmed conclusively.
You have to respect the wisdom of the protocol designers in making them usable even by a manually telnetting human.
I hate this 'rule of thumb' that people keep trotting out that we only use x% of software, for some low value of 'x'. That's simply not true, so stop bringing it up like it's a valid argument for anything.
I keep hearing this bullshit if from Unix zealots, from people flogging 'thin' or 'web 2.0' products, and from Luddites that are 'perfectly happy' running WordPerfect 5.1 on their OS/2 machine.
Lets think of a simple scenario. Imagine a fictional company MiniSoft Software that makes a word processor. They advertise that their program has 100 features! Of course, you know that most users will only use about 10% of that most of the time, and maybe an occasional 1% rarely. So why have the other 89 features in there? Most users won't be using it!
What this kind of oversimplified 'analysis' misses is that that '1%' extra is different for every user. Glenda in marketing might use the 'mail merge' feature once a month. The payroll officer might have to use the database integration feature. The warehouse manager might be using the barcode printing. The international sales office might use the Unicode multi-lingual features.
Once you add up all of those '1%' pieces, all too often, you end up with... 100 features or so. This is why MiniSoft Office is so 'bloated'. Because somewhere, out there, there's someone who uses the macro functionality, or the right-to-left text input, or the dynamic forms, or... something. It's not bloat... it's what users expect from their software -- that the same consistent product be useful for all of the staff in an entire business.
So to reiterate, just because YOU only personally use the "bold" and "italic" buttons on the toolbar doesn't mean that someone else can get by with only those two buttons.
Get used to it, because software is only going to get bigger and more 'bloated', not less.