Plugin Bloat (speeding up OpenOffice?)

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Rich Braun wrote:
> 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.

With Linux, though, you have a choice.  You can find distributions of
Linux that include the 108" flat screen TV, hot tub, and espresso maker,
and you can find distributions that will fit on a board that would fit
in your pocket.  Maybe you're looking at the wrong distributions.

At the last InstallFest, we successfully installed a modern distro on a
laptop with 128M RAM (I think it was Damn Small Linux).


> 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".

There are several audiences for Linux,  The ones who want Windows
replacements are much more vocal than the ones who want to run Linux on
their PDA and 8-year-old PC.  That the former gets much more publicity
doesn't mean there aren't good options for the latter.

> 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.


If they're plugins.... remove them!  That's the whole idea of plugins.

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