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Software bloat makes me sad

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Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#71

Post by wongarsu »

runj__ wrote: post #49
aikah wrote: post #15

point 2 about atom: Well, writing a text editor is far more complicated than it seems at first place.In order to support big files (50mb logs for instance), you need to make all your code rely on complex memory management, streaming and caching. Maybe js is not the right tool for the job in order to implement these features. I always thought that atom should be build in Qt with an api that can interact with JS,a bit…

Atom is a super weird example, wouldn't it bloat the software to add support for files larger than 2MB? Wouldn't that be feature bloat? I mean, a code editor shouldn't have to deal with gigantic files since code shouldn't be written that way [citation needed] .

One obvious use case for opening large files in a code editor are XML files. XML files can be huge but can profit a lot from the features of a good code editor.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#72

Post by smaili »

emsy wrote: post #17

Atom and Vim (and imo even Ubuntu) aren't good example of software bloat. While they might be slow and use a lot of memory, they're usually shipped with basic functionality and more functions can be added and removed at any time. Good examples are iTunes, Office, iOS and Android (the latter two are usually shipped with non removable bloatware).

> While they might be slow and use a lot of memory, they're usually shipped with basic functionality and more functions can be added and removed at any time.

Isn't that what bloat is? By definition, something that's shipped with "basic functionality" should not consume so much.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#73

Post by Kaali »

bloateddevtards wrote: post #52
Kaali wrote: post #22

There is another side of extra resource use that I don't really see addressed except in the mobile space: ecology. Even though my computer can run all applications without a hitch, it is still very wasteful to constantly use CPU power because of technology choices or plain laziness. As an example, Spotify and Slack are two applications that seem to use most of my CPU after Chrome. Spotify and Slack combined seems to…

A very good point, we should have a metric that establishes how much carbon is released extra into the environment from cpu cycle wasting crap like atom and even more bloated versions of word. Clippy could pop up: "I can see you would like to release an extra ton of carbon into the atmos, why not upgrade word now!"

Apple has started doing something about energy efficiency, probably because most of their computers are laptops where energy use is quite important. OSX tracks energy efficiency, which somehow calculates how much power a single application uses (CPU + GPU if I remember correctly). But I don't think they do anything with that info at the moment.

I guess it would be a nice incentive for developers if OSX could notify you that an app that is on background is using a lot of energy at the moment, maybe even with a quit-button when on battery power. At least I wouldn't want my app to end up on that kind of a popup.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#74

Post by wongarsu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #53
bloateddevtards wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure we need to go as lean as hand-rolled asm, but we sure went down a wrong path when we just accept that word will get bigger and bigger with each release. No one asks why.

I think so too. It's not about ASM snippets; it's about people not knowing what their software actually does. Software bloat isn't magic, nor is it static; your CPU is doing something . If with time application gets bigger and slower, and yet no extra features appear to explain it, it means your CPU is running code that shouldn't be run, wasting its cycles on pointless and irrelevant computations. That's laziness and…

>That's laziness and/or stupidity

Or the failure of a large team to properly manage software complexity.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#75

Post by vezzy-fnord »

digi_owl wrote: post #64
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fully internationalized, including support for CJK input methods? i18n is an orthogonal service that the DE or any other program may call into. Is it fully accessible to users with disabilities, e.g. blind people and people with mobility impairments? Screen readers and screen magnifiers are orthogonal services that the DE may make accommodations for, though some DEs may be lesser fit for users with disabilities…

Not sure if device node managers are the right place either, as not every mount is related to a local device. NFS in the classic cross-network *nix mount. And depending on available software (FUSE and related) you can mount the likes of SMB/CIFS shares, FTP servers, even SSH/FISH can be used via a mount.

NFS grossly violates POSIX file system semantics, so it's better to use something like 9P/Styx, instead.

Unix systems really aren't good at abstracting local and remote mounts and binds into a singular resource, but the parent poster's scenario was implied to be a local user hotplug, which is what device managers largely do (if even that, udev these days just maintains the /dev/disk/* symlinks and handles query requests for the hardware database).

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#76

Post by mwcampbell »

Kaali wrote: post #70
tormeh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they have poor algorithms or whatever, it's that they're part native, to handle the desktop interaction and the rest is a bunch off html/css/JavaScript running in an embedded browser. At least that's how Spotify works. The problem is that our tools for making multiplatform native GUI's suck so bad we'd rather just embed an entire Web browser into everything.

There are some okayish cross platform frameworks, such as QT and even JavaFX. One of the main complaints of cross platform GUI's has been that they don't work like native applications. But for some reason nobody cares when the app works like a single page web app, which in many cases is a lot worse than even plain old Swing apps. Which at least supports right-click properly. I think the main reason that node-webkit a…

> There are some okayish cross platform frameworks, such as QT and even JavaFX. One of the main complaints of cross platform GUI's has been that they don't work like native applications. But for some reason nobody cares when the app works like a single page web app, which in many cases is a lot worse than even plain old Swing apps. Which at least supports right-click properly.

There's more to non-nativeness than just look and feel, which the more mature cross-platform GUI toolkits can ape fairly well. Another concern is accessibility for people with disabilities, e.g. blind people using screen readers. Qt, for example, is kind of accessible on Windows, Linux, and Mac, but not at all on mobile platforms. Not sure about the status of JavaFX. At least a single-page rich web app can be made accessible using the ARIA extensions to HTML, and if you use one of the big four web rendering engines, you can be sure they've done the hard work of implementing the underlying OS accessibility APIs well. Of course, many (most?) web developers don't implement ARIA for their custom UIs.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#77

Post by adrusi »

Freaky wrote: post #54
kkapelon wrote: post #11

"There are very little tools available to to help the user select unbloated software" Actually there is a whole community around this http://suckless.org/

It's a funny idea of sucking less where any user configuration involves editing config.h and recompiling.

As a big fan of suckless software I can agree. While I understand the reasoning behind it, that configuration files are awful and introduce needless dependencies and make it too easy to leave a design decision up to the user as a config option rather than just picking the right choice for them, having to recompile software is a problem. The biggest issue is package management. I maintain local forks of some AUR packages for st and surf (the suckless terminal and web browser). It was a lot more work to set up than the single command that installing software should be, and I don't get automatic updates.

But if suckless maybe takes their fight against bloat too far, it's only because hardly anyone else seems to care at all.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#78

Post by orkoden »

bloateddevtards wrote: post #41
goldfire wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to start Microsoft Word right now, here's what I have to do: I press the Windows key, type "word", press enter, and then wait for it to start. That entire process takes three seconds; I just timed it. Now that Word's been run once already, I can start it again in less than one second. That compares pretty favorably with the process of finding a floppy disk, inserting it, and then finally running a command o…

Once it installed from the floppy, why would I need to keep using from the floppy? You also described caching behaviour of the OS, rather than the huge size of modern day word.

You have a hard drive? Rich people these days...

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#79

Post by prof_hobart »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #47
goldfire wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to start Microsoft Word right now, here's what I have to do: I press the Windows key, type "word", press enter, and then wait for it to start. That entire process takes three seconds; I just timed it. Now that Word's been run once already, I can start it again in less than one second. That compares pretty favorably with the process of finding a floppy disk, inserting it, and then finally running a command o…

That's probably because you have SSD, but anyway; I could do the exact same process 10 years ago (with "winword" instead of "word"), get similar response times, and yet the software was an order of magnitude smaller and more responsive. And it's not like Word gained many actually useful features during that time.

The Word I used 10 years ago was nowhere near as responsive as the one I use today.

Maybe yours was faster, but I think a lot of people have rose-tinted memories of the speed of applications in the old days.

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