Code bloat has become astronomical | Hacker News Reader

Code bloat has become astronomical

positech.co.uk

51 pointstodsacerdoti8 comments

Personal experience: my laptop (older Dell) has gotten so much quieter and cooler since switching over to Linux from Windows. I don't really have anything against Windows, and their WSL2 is pretty great and allowed me to learn the bash command line and run Linux programs in that environment, but the fans were always humming and telemetry was nonstop and massive updates were nonstop (granted I signed up for the Insider Ring thing so perhaps it's not surprising). I actually wonder if I had some crypto-mining malware running or something like that. After wiping the drive, flashing the BIOS and doing a Debian install my computer is almost always cool and quiet and I don't use it any more or less than I did before.

Also while code bloat seems endemic in web development, the embedded world still relies on compact efficient code written in languages like C, so a lot of people are still learning to program in that style, which is a good thing.

Another data point: for me, it’s the complete opposite. On my new acer laptop with dual boot, windows runs nicely and quietely does what I tell it to, except for some random unwarranted Cortana stuff once in a while.

On the other hand, Ubuntu is completely unusable due to noise of the fans that spin up like crazy for the most trivial of operations.

What model laptop is it? Is the battery management on performance or battery saving?

This used to be a frequent problem in the 2000s with Linux but I thought it was largely fixed except on the very newest laptops (takes 3-6 months for kinks to be worked out in my experience after a laptops release).

My guess is that your GPU is rendering everything. Install the proprietary drivers and enable hybrid graphics mode in the BIOS. Mine was the same way. Nice and quiet now and battery life is nearly twice as good.

Close to nobody wants to pay $ to get less “bloat”. End of story. The same way that almost nobody wants to pay $ to get 100% bug free software. Incentives and markets run the world. Either accept it and move on, or continue wasting your time being upset/agitated about it and write angry words that will make exactly zero difference in the world.

No one except nerds cares. The incentives are all wrong.

"Reality is that which doesn't cease to exist when you stop thinking about it", they say.

Or, to elaborate, these things have a cost whether people are aware of it (and care about it) or not. Maybe it's not so high now, but eventually it's likely to manifest itself, especially when the codebase needs to run in a new environment or be modified to follow a new paradigm. Those situations are where things tend to either "make the jump" and continue to be used or end up in the (already vast) graveyard of abandoned software because the cost of maintaining it became higher than the return it yielded.

The costs are also a benefit to everyone except the users: bloated software makes it easier to sell new hardware. Abandoned software means programmers get jobs writing the new version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com