I often hear folks in the Linux community discussing their preference for Arch (and Linux in general) because they can install only the packages they want or need - no bloat.
I’ve come across users with a couple of hundred packages installed (likely fresh installs), but I’ve also seen others with thousands.
Personally, I’m currently at 1.7k packages on my desktop and 1.3k on my laptop (both running EndeavourOS). There might be a few packages I could remove, but I don’t feel like my system is bloated.
I guess it’s subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?
I’m asking as a relatively new Linux user - been daily driving for about 7/8 months
If it affects system performance and gives me no noticeable benefit. Otherwise, flash bytes are cheap. I’ve got 30TB+ in my laptop. Why do I care if I have a 3GB OS or a 2.95GB OS?
30TB? You’re in the 0.0001% for laptop storage. I have more than 98% of people and I have 3TB.
Not everyone is this fortunate. Some people have cheapo laptops with 32GB eMMC. Now, 3GB vs 2.95GB is still negligible, but 4GB vs 5GB is definitely not negligible.
Even the shit laptops come with 256GB nowadays. Saving less than 0.5% of storage on OS optimizations that reduce usability is a poor tradeoff.
Heck even my phone has 1TB… Flash bytes are cheap. If you have a 32GB soldered down chip, buy a flash drive for the price of a BjgMac and voila you’ve 4x’d your storage.
People don’t have brand new laptops all the time. Often, they have crappy 10 year old laptops because they can’t afford anything better, especially in poorer parts of the world.
In MicroSD cards flash is cheap. But unfortunately, most phones don’t come with MicroSD slots anymore, and instead they come with huge storage markups. According to Apple, which controls a big section of the market, a Big Mac gets you a whopping 5GB of storage, that’s if you buy today. But with a 5 year old phone, a Big Mac back then would get you 1GB of storage that you use today. And in many countries, most people make less than a Big Mac per day.