Comment by 🚀 stack
Re: "Linux Drags In Unnecessary Crap"
I've never heard of --no-install-recommends before!
But I also noticed that 'linux firmware' updates drag in ~500MB of 'firmware' (without sources!). As someone who's written a lot of firmware, I am stunned -- I think in my entire life I've written maybe some kilobytes of firmware. When writing code for microcontrollers and such, it is difficult to write hundreds of kilobytes of code, and megabytes -- unthinkable.
Jan 07 · 4 months ago
23 Later Comments ↓
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 07 at 01:08:
My other example of sheer stupidity: Balena Etcher, a program that basically does
That is, it writes an image onto an SD-card or other such device.
It is a 150MB zip file!
That is just so stupid that I cannot believe it.
Made with JS, HTML, node.js and Electron. Etcher is built on open source tools and is and always will be free and open source to use!
Amazingly, this 'product' supports this idiot company!
We ain't never gonna make it.
🐦 wasolili [...] · Jan 07 at 02:07:
And why is this bash script pulling in all these libraries? Well, for no good reason. Just in case?
my guess is it's because neofetch supports using some of them, like it uses ImageMagick and w3m if you use it in image mode.
(why neofetch supports this is beyond me)
🗡️ The_Jackal · Jan 07 at 03:47:
@stack I see that no install recommends is a thing (thank you for some new linux knowledge), but still, there's many things where there's features that are just bloat and you can't get rid of them. When I mentioned that I didn't exactly mean Linux, I meant in general with all software.
🌆 skyjake [...] · Jan 07 at 05:12:
@The_Jackal:
147mb for a text based application that just shows your distro's logo in ASCII
Not defending the packagers' choices here, but the extra 147 MB of libraries are mostly for image and font processing for the graphical features, not ASCII.
At least some modern terminal emulators have the ability to show pixel-based images (which is silly IMHO), and neofetch has optional support for that (showing the distro logos as real images, not ASCII).
🗡️ The_Jackal · Jan 07 at 05:30:
@skyjake Oh. Thank you for clarifying that. I'm trying to learn more about computers and things related to them but it's a very slow process so far.
🚀 SavaRocks · Jan 07 at 07:53:
yeah, it is easier to just
lsblk
lsusb
cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/meminfo
no new packages required. you could also make a simple bash script to output all this stuff ... but then you'd make another neofetch
🚀 SavaRocks · Jan 07 at 08:12:
I forgot
lspci
😅
☕️ tenno-seremel · Jan 07 at 08:39:
You can disable this behavior in /etc/apt/apt.conf:
The last 2 lines make it so, that packages installed automatically this way are not considered important and will be removed during autopurge. If you do not want that either do not set them or mark them as installed manually with apt-mark manual <package>.
And I thought Windows has an annoying bloat issue, but I think it's more different with Linux tbf. I sometimes wish I could seamlessly switch to Linux from Windows, at least without techinal hiccups and stuff. I'm still going to wait until I get another laptop, or I could use my old heavy HP laptop to switch to Linux Mint, but I'll think about it though. I don't know.
👻 darkghost · Jan 07 at 11:15:
Wait till you guys see the deployment systems like snap and flatpak. I wanted to install Maps from GNOME and the flatpak was 2.2 GB on Mint. The system package was 6 MB and no additional dependencies presumably because they were met with everything else already installed.
What would have happened installing fastfetch? Neofetch is depressed, I think.
☕️ tenno-seremel · Jan 07 at 13:07:
@Homer It depends only on libc6 and libyyjson0 (Debian 13).
love that it tried to pull in toilet and toilet-fonts ;)
@stack Which company are you saying that Balena Etcher is supporting? I don't see any company mentioned in that quote you have there for it in your comment.
💎 Vindemiatrix · Jan 07 at 17:55:
Yeah this is nuts. I would love a minimalist, bloat free desktop OS for something like a Raspberry Pi. I use overpowered, bloated machines all the time but there should exist an alternative. If it’s not Linux, what could it be?
🗡️ The_Jackal · Jan 07 at 17:58:
@Vindemiatrix Maybe some of the BSDs like OpenBSD or FreeBSD? Finding the right hardware can be finnicky from what I've seen
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 07 at 19:10:
@meidam: I meant that it is the flagship product of Balena, supporting that 'business' of repackaging functionality built into every linux box. Apparently the company, originally Resin.io, was in the business of 'securing capital' to develop bullshit products to 'simplify the way developers build, deploy, and manage software for IOT devices'.
— https://venturebeat.com/technology/balena-raises-14-4-million-to-simplify-iot-device-management
etc...
Total funding: 101M in 7 rounds.
2020 revenue: $36,300 (thirty six thousand three hundred dollars)
2020 valuation: 1/2 billion.
75 employees?
Fake business?
👻 darkghost · Jan 07 at 19:35:
@Vindemiatrix You can run RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi. Its the OS the old Acorn Archimedes ran from the 90s. While it's fun to mess around with, it isn't cut out for modern workflows. But it is blisteringly fast because it's designed for 25 year old hardware.
Gentoo does this correctly -- neofetch has no dependencies, but if you install it you will be told that you can get optional features by installing additional packages (e.g. imagemagick for thumbnail creation, apparently).
🚂 methodius · Feb 03 at 19:18:
@Vindemiatrix I have some hopes for Haiku as a less bloated desktop OS. To me it has "that feel" of Linux 20 years ago, although unfortunately it only supports x86/x64 right now, so no Raspberry Pi yet (although it seems possible to build it for arm64).
— https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/compiling-arm64/
Your comment made me wonder… it could be an interesting experiment to run Haiku on a cheap x64 mini PC and try to use it at least as a semi-daily driver.
👻 darkghost · Feb 03 at 19:40:
@methodius I have done this. Well, I used an 18 year old laptop, but still. It works. And you can do it... with caveats. YMMV. You should know it is very buggy and the code is very unoptimized, meaning it is slow. Slower than lightweight Linux (eg MX) on similar hardware. RAM usage is less though. The main web browser is a trademark free Firefox running on some kind of Wayland to Haiku GUI layer and this has oddities with screen redraw. There is also a native browser called Webpositive that won't work on a lot of sites but is way faster. Lagrange is available but has an SDL bug that crashes it on resize. Maximize works though. Libreoffice is missing a dependency, install liberation fonts to fix.
🚂 methodius · Feb 03 at 19:50:
That's good to know, thanks! On a more recent machine it should run better, given that even cheap ones have way better performance than the best 18-year-old ones. Too bad that Lagrange is buggy: I was hoping to maybe use such a machine for Gemini and other "small net" stuff. Are you still using it?
👻 darkghost · Feb 03 at 21:45:
Lagrange works just fine. Just don't resize the window unless you're going to maximize it. There's kristall as well but it straight up doesn't work for me, emulated or on bare metal
Original Post
— spell.mywire.org:1960/~stack/0254.gmi
Linux Drags In Unnecessary Crap