Stavro
March 1st, 2009, 09:04 PM
I’m just curious, does anyone agree with me that I think software is becoming increasingly bloated, maybe especially on Windows. This is a bad thing I believe, and it means the average user does not really notice much of a speed increase should they upgrade their hardware.
I like many linux applications because they do tend to be light and functional. I know that there is also a trade-off between functionality and keeping an application light, but sometimes extra functionality is not of the utmost-importance (take an instant messenger program for example) and a reliable program with less features is probably better than one which crashes often. Yahoo Messenger springs to mind, I’ve seen that go wrong quite a few times, whereas Pidgin is excellent and handles all the protocols!
I don’t think anyone will disagree that Vista is very bloated, and I really don’t like how Microsoft have changed perfectly working and well standardized API’s which served well previous versions of Windows (backwards compatibility to Microsoft’s credit has always been a strong point). Most likely this was done not in the interest of user at all, but to encourage developers to write needless Vista only applications so as to help boost and force new license sales.
Does anyone here though, also think that Linux is becoming unnecessary bloated in certain departments. Being open-source, I can imagine it will have a very modular nature which might tend to lead towards this, but maybe something’s could be slimmed down a little. Further, it could be that there are far too many flavors of Linux. The standardized Windows API that I was talking about above has served Windows very well, applications work on most occasions as expected on many computers. Perhaps if Linux was to take more of the market share it needs to advertise itself as one-clear distribution that is generalized in a way that Windows is and is most suitable for meeting the needs of a variety of different users (musicians, graphic-design, novelists etcetera). Of course, there will always be the more technically inclined who might specifically seek out a system which is highly customized for their needs, but this does not help getting the word out. Most computer users are creatures of comfort, you go to a friends place and you have the familiar Start button, task-bar, my computer that you might see on your computer at work, your own and so-forth. There is a familiarity and it makes it easier to solve problems. Whereas there seems to be a bit of a silly competition between KDE, Gnome even XFCE, and some applications that work on one don’t work on the other. They need to be merged somehow.
I wonder if anyone agrees?
I like many linux applications because they do tend to be light and functional. I know that there is also a trade-off between functionality and keeping an application light, but sometimes extra functionality is not of the utmost-importance (take an instant messenger program for example) and a reliable program with less features is probably better than one which crashes often. Yahoo Messenger springs to mind, I’ve seen that go wrong quite a few times, whereas Pidgin is excellent and handles all the protocols!
I don’t think anyone will disagree that Vista is very bloated, and I really don’t like how Microsoft have changed perfectly working and well standardized API’s which served well previous versions of Windows (backwards compatibility to Microsoft’s credit has always been a strong point). Most likely this was done not in the interest of user at all, but to encourage developers to write needless Vista only applications so as to help boost and force new license sales.
Does anyone here though, also think that Linux is becoming unnecessary bloated in certain departments. Being open-source, I can imagine it will have a very modular nature which might tend to lead towards this, but maybe something’s could be slimmed down a little. Further, it could be that there are far too many flavors of Linux. The standardized Windows API that I was talking about above has served Windows very well, applications work on most occasions as expected on many computers. Perhaps if Linux was to take more of the market share it needs to advertise itself as one-clear distribution that is generalized in a way that Windows is and is most suitable for meeting the needs of a variety of different users (musicians, graphic-design, novelists etcetera). Of course, there will always be the more technically inclined who might specifically seek out a system which is highly customized for their needs, but this does not help getting the word out. Most computer users are creatures of comfort, you go to a friends place and you have the familiar Start button, task-bar, my computer that you might see on your computer at work, your own and so-forth. There is a familiarity and it makes it easier to solve problems. Whereas there seems to be a bit of a silly competition between KDE, Gnome even XFCE, and some applications that work on one don’t work on the other. They need to be merged somehow.
I wonder if anyone agrees?