There is a big problem with a lot of free software nowadays, and that's bloat. There's a really good article put out by the suckless community on this issue (suckless.org/philosophy). This page does good at describing the practical problems of bloated software, but I want to talk about the ethical issues surrounding "bloatware".
Now, technically, all bloatware put under a free licence is free software. But that doesn't mean that you can edit it, at least not easily. Freedom 1 of the Four Essential Freedoms states that the user has the freedom to "study how the program works." How the hell can you study the program if it's all jumbled up? This produces the same problem that proprietary blobs do: a gateway from studying how the program works. It may be easier than machine program to read, but given enough lines, the program becomes virtually unreadable.
What are some examples of this?
Now, how can we solve this? Start by using simple software. Don't use urxvt, use st. Don't use i3, use dwm. Now that's not to shill the suckless community. But they're really the only ones pushing on this issue, even though they only come at it from a practical perspective. Start by rolling up your sleeves and learning how to patch these programs so they do the things you want them to do.
Another good idea is to build a LFS build using only simple programs. Rather than the GNU utilities, use some of the BSD utilities, or Plan 9. Ideally this should be available in a distro, but that probably won't happen for a while. If anyone wants to work on this with me over the long term, let me know in this thread.
It does. You have to thank diversity (in hardware) for that.
Logan Cox
Nothing screams "virgin" more than a tech autist masturbating over how sui generis he is for using minimal software. Let's not forget: the C programming language is an extremely unsafe, hacky language in which everything is a member pointer. It has no array bounds checking, you can return pointers to temporary stack memory, and the language is so bad that compilers for the language will remove integer overflow and underflow checks because those checks use undefined behavior, you can use variables which are uninitialized and thus contain junk memory.
Elijah Johnson
dohoho post discarded.
Daniel Sanchez
Let's also not forget your post went through several hundred million lines of C to reach me and it went quite well, while webdevs like in the OP have trouble writing 100 lines of code without creating a disaster.
Jeremiah Scott
More like featureless. Gotta love recompiling all my shit just to slightly customize it.
So, you have no idea what you're talking about.
GNU software is bloated because when it was developed the quality wasn't the goal, the goal was to provide a free alternatives to proprietary tools. If instead of bitching and making more "alternatives" people would just contribute to GNU we wouldn't have such a problem.
And in case of Linux, you're looking at the problem from top. OpenBSD might be more minimal but it doesn't support nearly as much hardware as Linux does. Before "fixing" the software consider "fixing" the hardware first.
Austin Lewis
do not take 's bait
Blake Collins
Then you just patch the kernel so it supports your hardware. Ideally companies should provide the patches themselves, but community patches are cool too.
Patching st takes absolutely no time at all. It's just as easy as making changes to your vimrc file. I don't know a lick of C, and yet I am able to run patch and make. Fuck right off.
this gives me a smug anime face
Nathaniel Fisher
Argumentum ad populum. Ada has advanced support for type checking, you can create types with specific ranges (e.g. an integer with values from 0 to 12), you can write modules, exceptions (in other languages the system gives you an error code you can't just ignore or the software will crash), 'generics' which means you can write a data structure (like lists) which will work on different kinds of data, like integers, floating point numbers, and strings. So, by writing just one function for all data types instead of writing functions for all data types specifically, the language has run-time checking and so many other features. The kicker of Ada is that it's a higher level language than C and about a million times safer. The GCC compiler framework generates the fastest code for C, but GCC also supports Ada and the code generated for Ada is nearly as fast as the code for C. It also supports every architecture/platform that is supported by GCC. You'd think, why do programmers hate Ada? C programmers in the 80's would use so many bullshit excuses like that the compilers for the language were expensive, or the language is too complicated (it's much simpler than C in day to day usage). The real reason is because they're just too lazy to learn Ada. The reason for 'bloat' is because C makes it difficult to write good, maintainable, secure code. To you morons everything that isn't C is "bondage-and-discipline". Imagine the horror of using 1950's programming language features and practices. >and it went quite well, while webdevs like in the OP have trouble writing 100 lines of code without creating a disaster. C/UNIX idiots have a hard time writing curl/wget (pure C) without a thousand vulnerabilities (which they have an attitude about, and refuse to fix).
Caleb Hughes
What sort of argument is that? If his kernel had keep written in Ada, it would've been serveral hundred million lines of Ada. Or Rust. Or Erlang, or Elixir, or Lisp, or Java, or whatever. You're making an inane argument that C is better because it's more popular - that's not even an argument. Maybe it's worse, because it's so easy to learn even retards are using it.
