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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?"
Now that one's easy! `ed`. It's the standard editor for a reason, after all.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Lynx, anyone? :)
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?
http://blog.heavensdomain.net
irfanview. Despite plugin capabilities, among many many other features, it is small, free, and faassssst compared to all the other image viewers I've tried (not all that many)
I'd like to see this list include things that are conveniently free of spyware/trojans, too!
Bonzi Buddy
QED.
Website Hosting
Of course, now I'm on OS X, and the Mac port is fugly, so I haven't touched it in a while.
I would guess that whatever your favorite non-bloat software is, it is most likely in Damn Small Linux...
] call -151
* 300: ad 30 c0 20 ed fd 4c 00 03
* 300g
Hours of random entertainment!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Putty is 412 KB for an SSH client that supports window resizing and has no installer! Doesn't hurt that it's open source either.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Foobar2k! Best audio player for Windows ever. http://foobar2000.org/ Quite minimalistic, but highly configurable. Very low memory footprint and plays basically everything.
http://www.tinyapps.org/
If you're running Windows, I also like Sumatra PDF
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
(not sure if that's listed at the former or no, which is why I specifically mention it --- the balance of my preferred small programs are)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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
IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) . There's no better for image viewing an batch manipulation.
Actually, those are the only 2 freeware programs I use. The rest, I pay for them. I don't use freeware and OS programs just because. That's not a religion and I firmly believe in commercial applications, so I help the developers buying the programs I need, even if there is an almost identical free variant.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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.
tee. Only two command-line options.
The way it should be. It's name is it's documentation too.
gus
.. if only.
Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip
Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>
Read my blog: HansMast.com
Foxit Reader
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
Still the best mail client around. :)
We'll make great pets
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...
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
If you use Windows I cannot sufficiently recommend Miranda IM. It's very lightweight (3MB download, 8MB RAM active) multi-IM client. You might call it the Foobar of Windows IM clients. It's got a fantastic community writing plugins and providing support on the official forums. The plugins are really numerous and cool too - Skype APIs, LCD display functionality, log analyzers, IM platform add-ons, out-of-office automators, a Windows uptime util, and hundreds more. It's also got great multinational localizations.
I switched to Miranda from GAIM (which I switched to from Trillian) and I haven't regretted it for one moment. It's very snappy and responsive, it automatically resizes vertically depending on how many contacts are online, it appears and disappears with a single click of the tray icon, it auto-updates the base program as well as the plugins... I could go on and on.
Give it a try. It's free! http://www.miranda-im.org/
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.
IZarc as oposed to Winzip, or WinRAR or ... pretty much any other compression program
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.
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.
Rockbox is my favorite piece of unbloated software.
Great care is taken to keep the core as small as possible, while maintaining focus on the fundamental goal of being the best DAP firmware possible.
Xvid download: 628K, simple install DivX download: 22.5MB, loads of crapware, nagging reminders to upgrade, etc.
There was someone above who mentioned Trillian, but by far my favorite pick is Pidgin IM (formerly Gaim)
You avoid all of the bloat of AIM and MSN Messenger (which is now beyond ridiculous) plus you rid yourself of the need to install several messaging clients which further saves space and startup time plus it keeps your system tray (in windows) much cleaner. And the best part, it's available as open source for Windows and Linux!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
It's the only IM client that doesn't annoy me anymore. Amazing little program.
A close second would be uTorrent.
Windows Vista.
Regards,
Steve Ballmer
uTorrent (http://www.utorrent.com), hands down.
219kb for an incredibly fast, RAM-efficient, full-blown, full-featured GUI Torrent client, with Web administration, scheduling, and all the stuff.
Now if the whole world could only code as well as uTorrent's author...
Editors: PFE (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/def ault.htm) is a featureful and very slim editor for Windows
Encryption: TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) takes less than 2 megs to hold the main executable along with both 32 and 63bit XP/Vista drivers. The Wizzard is a separate program that can optionally be included.
Browsers: Excluding text-only and phone browsers, Opera is a clear winner for the memory footprint. It's much slower on JS though, so I'm waiting to see which improvements they made with 9.5 on that.
Operating systems: The same Linux OS that runs my highly-powered workstations also runs on my 200Mhz 8MB ram/4MB flash router. It's just a matter of what you compile in. For me this seems like a winner too. Just look for tinny distros (Slackware with custom install is my reference as full-featured yet tiny distro, but there are also much smaller ones too) of just do it yourself with LFS.
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?
Opera stays useable even with 512 mb of ram and a few hundreds of tabs, althought that is pushing its limits
(you know you are addicted to tabs when...)
Logitech mouse drivers on the other hands are memory monsters
Still looking for a low-memory antivirus that requieres absolutely no user interaction. Grisoft AVG uses little memory, but keeps requiring occasional user interaction for updates, so I hesitate to install it on someone elses machine. Clamwin is worse in that department however.
I used to use a great browser call Phoenix, that was light and fast. Then it changed its name and changed its name again. I still use it because its still the best browser and by far my favorite, however I have trouble calling it light and fast these days.
"Luke, I am your node.parent();"
Hmm... I find your recommendation insufficient.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think Farbrausch are the gods of fitting the most into the smallest space.
check out some of their 4k and 64k demos and prepare to be amazed. fr-30 candytron is particularly good. or fr-025 the popular demo.
You can download their stuff here
The last computer I had it on took X seconds to get to a POST beep and Y more seconds to get to a BeOS desktop, and X was greater than Y.
Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot to do with it but marvel at its boot time and launch a bunch of QuickTime movies. ArtPaint gave me a glimpse of how fast Photoshop could be, but of course a port never came. (Plus ArtPaint crashed a lot.) The 3D music editing demo app was great but it, too, crashed a lot. I'm glad Apple went with NeXT for the basis of OS X because it's more of a "real" UNIX as compared to the single-user BeOS, but I'd probably just as happy in most ways and happier in some if JLG hadn't been so greedy. Of course, no NeXT means no Steve, and no iMac, iLife, iPod, or iPhone--just freakishly fast beige boxes and probably no market share.
OK, got a little off topic here, but the point remains--if you don't want bloat, check out BeOS. (And get a time machine.) Or QNX--they used to have a demo version that fit a GUI, browser, and web server onto a 1.44 MB floppy.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Steve Gibson of SpinRite fame has this page: http://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm
Of course, he programs directly in assembly in his quest to keep things small and fast.
Using GIMP, did you ever look at the setting called "Tile cache size" in Preferences / Environment? This sets the maximum amount of RAM that GIMP can use before it starts to swap some parts of images (tiles) to disk.
You can set this value to 4 GB and GIMP will happily use as much memory as you have. And it will be much, much faster when working with large images. As a rule of thumb, you should set this value to around 80% of your available memory.
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.
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>
"Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
20 FD ED: JSR $FDED - prints the content of the Accumulator to the screen - since what you read from the speaker line is technically random, it prints a random character to the screen - potentially including arrow keys and bell characters...
4C 00 03: JMP $0300 enough said.
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.
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.
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
Enlightenment 17 is the only modern desktop solution I know of that packs a ton of bling without even a trace of bloat. Definitely my favorite bloat-free software.
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
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.
WinImages' EXE is about 4.6 megs. Feature-wise, it is comparable to Photoshop most ways, with some different approaches here and there. Considerably more powerful than the current release of Gimp. It loads and executes essentially immediately on any modern machine (say a GHz or better), even first time after a system reboot (doesn't depend on OS caching for startup speed.)
It will use 250 megs if that's how much memory is required to hold an image (in four 62.5 meg allocations - R, G, B and A.) If there isn't enough memory to do that, it depends upon the OS to handle the virtualization of the image data. All images are treated as 32-bit for processing purposes. All operators (filters, etc) directly approach the image buffers in memory for maximum speed. Users are definitely better off having enough memory.
WinImages is written in C, intentionally designed to use as few external functions (OS, DLL or otherwise) as possible as initially installed.
The footprint can be enlarged by adding plug ins, scripts, and various data files such as particle systems, ray trace scenes, palettes, brushes, curves, transitions, timelines, operator presets, tool caddies and the usual host of other ancillary files. The actual weight of image files typically dwarfs WinImages' resource usage almost no matter what you do, and none of the above slows the software down in any appreciable manner.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
MPlayer plays anything I throw at it, and is open source. I used to have VLC, but got disappointed in its buggy subtitle support. Best of all, Mplayer doesn't have a GUI, so the visual bloat is minimal.
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.
Edit Pad Lite http://editpadlite.com/
It has amazing find/replace capabilities that I haven't seen in other text apps. Edit Pad Lite is free (the download is a bit hidden at that URL) and Pro costs money but has regexp, syntax, etc.
It's the only Windows app I really miss in Linux.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
How many programs for Windows have existed almost unchanged for as long as Windows has existed.
The kernel. *rimshot*
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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
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.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Portable Freeware is my favorite site for programs that will run on a USB flash drive (or floppy if they're small enough) without the need to install on the host machine and create registry entries and the like. The focus of the site is portability, but generally speaking that also means bloat-free.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I consider my time more valuable than the RAM for which I have already paid (RAM is a sunk cost at that point).
I would much rather have Bloat-O-Shop take 20 seconds and whatever resources it needs to apply a filter to a huge image than wait 20 MINUTES for Gimp to do the same task in a tiny amount of RAM, assuming I have configured Gimp to use RAM sparingly. I can turn around and send out that image 19 minutes, 40 seconds sooner than the guy (a girl would not be so foolish) using an identical installation of Gimp, so whom do you think gets more work in the future?
[x] I do not expect these arguments to be persuasive to those who spend days/weeks/months slaving over a hot terminal session cranking out software, only to give it away for free.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
or 2GB, in outlook.
(I know I got modded troll, offtopic, and lame for this the other day)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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.