Plugin Bloat (speeding up OpenOffice?)

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Upgrading memory does, of course, make sense.  This does beg the question,
though--whatever happened to the "old" Linux?

I first ran Linux on a 386DX-25 with 4 megs of memory.  Everything was nice
and speedy up through the 486 and early Pentium line.

Ever since then, it's all been downhill.  The fastest computer I ever used, in
terms of how much it actually got done for me, was a CDC Cyber 173 installed
in--get this--summer 1978.

Bloatware seems to be killing everything.  Maybe Steve Jobs is onto something
with that new phone of his.  If someone could just come up with an open-source
version of *that*, something which would fit in a pocket and do everything
responsively, I'd be much happier than with the current trend toward gigabytes
of memory getting hogged by apps that grow without bound at a somewhat faster
rate than the drop in memory prices, and a whole lot faster than the rate of
performance improvement in mass storage technology.

Just venting, I guess, I don't really see a solution.  The open-source
movement is pretty much by definition oriented toward bloat:  contributions
keep coming in and adding to the code pile.  One of the more recent aspects of
the movement is worthy of some debate:  "plugins".

I just set up a major new app on my now-pretty-old Linux box.  It's an app
that dates back to BBS days, and its developers have encouraged development of
plugins over the years to the point where there are now hundreds of them--very
few of which have ever gotten folded back into the base distribution for
proper testing.

Between the bloat slowing everything down, and the plugins requiring hours of
administrative headaches (downloading, resolving incompatibilities, fixing
file permissions, shuffling directories), using a Linux box is becoming more
of a headache than it used to be--even for those of us who know how to find
all the technical gotchas under the hood.

-rich


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