Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
] 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.
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.
Who needs the bloat of Lynx when you can telnet to port 80?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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
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 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!
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.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
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