Name Your Favorite Bloat-Free Software 1296
An anonymous reader writes "I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible. I can't stand bloated software like iTunes, as compared to Foobar or classic Winamp; or Windows Media Player, as compared to VLC or Media Player Classic. What are some of your favorite applications which are a little less bloated?"
MS Paint (Score:5, Interesting)
Other than that, I'd second the VLC and Winamp combo. Ever since there has been iPod support in Winamp (via a plugin or 'out of the box') I haven't used anything else.
Weird criteria (Score:3, Interesting)
My criteria are usability, utility, and functionality. For that reason iTunes is second on my list, with WinAMP all the way down at the bottom of 50. iPhoto recently shot up to #1 due to it's Web Gallery feature: Select an event, publish, and then edit the gallery at your leisure. The gallery is updated on the website "behind the scenes", so you never need to synchronize or revisit it, it's all done automatically.
iTunes is high on that list for a similar reason. Set up a few "Smart Playlists", and music is automatically added or removed from my queue as necessary depending on playcount, on ranking, on genre, or new additions. I never need to do anything except insert a CD, vote up or down my like of any particular song at the moment, or plug in my iPod.
Gives me more time to do other things... like rollerblading, taking pictures, or talking to people.
Zim (Score:3, Interesting)
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pr
suckless.org (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.suckless.org/wiki/dwm [suckless.org]
The tarball for it is only 19k, and doing a wc -l on all the *.c files gives 1781 lines. RSS on my system right now is only 1336K, which is smaller than a single bash shell. Probably not something someone infatuated with glittery stuff would like to run but it's definitely a small program.
memtest86 (Score:3, Interesting)
Konqueror (Score:3, Interesting)
Konqueror.
No, seriously.
Before my Clamshell iBook (running Gentoo Linux) died, my alternatives for web browsing were Konqueror and Firefox. I found that, despite the heaviness of qt versus gtk+, Konqueror was much nicer than Firefox in terms of both memory and CPU usage. (Opera was on par with Konqueror but... it gave me the creeps to use, I don't know why.)
-:sigma.SB
My Favoritse (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lynx? (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually used to do this a lot when I was working for a certain ISP that had very flaky homebrew mail software. Mailboxes were getting corrupted all the time. The only way to fix them was to telnet in and fiddle. Or just copy
Perl (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically I find it really annoying that to get even a fraction of the functionality of stock perl one has to import some library. Why do I have to import Regular expression or Strings in python? or for that matter, just to get the command line args I have to import a freakin library? And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
I don't want to rag on python here and this is not a flame to say perl is better than python. (python is in very many ways superior to perl for organized project programming. It also used to be easier to read since there was only one way to do something but that zen is gone now.)
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. Just the manpages or a quick reference will do. I hate language bloat.
Re:Can't live without (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Weird criteria (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall when I first bought an iPod I spent countless hours tweaking the id3 tags, instead of you know...talking to people.
Winamp, VLC, IrfanView, Scite, 7Zip
Oh, and programs that do have huge footprints that I think are great: Photoshop, Firefox, MS Access, SoundForge
Anything (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Zim (Score:3, Interesting)
ZuluPad is similar, but more advanced in some respects. 'Course, I wrote it, so I'm a bit biased.
Re:Weird criteria (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah. Like plugging in said mp3 player. Pshaw. Who ever does that?
Maybe if you spent less time fighting the software and let it do its job, you'd have better success. In short, PEBKAC.
Re:Weird criteria (Score:3, Interesting)
iTunes will play any file that Quicktime will play. And most not-already-supported-out-of-the-box codecs have a QT plugin. Which iTunes will inherit. And play.
Or did you mean the bastard version on Windows? 'Cause that's not the real iTunes. It's the bastard Windows version that has stripped down, just-enough-to-make-the-iPod-work-and-play-a-few-
iTunes is awesome. iTunes for Windows sucks balls. So which one are you comparing to Winamp? 'Cause I'm pretty sure Winamp falls between the two in functionality and probably just barely behind iTfW in usability.
Re:Oh! (Score:2, Interesting)
mac classic (Score:3, Interesting)
On linux, the mini OS distros,damn small, puppy, slax, austrumi, etc. proving you can have a decent functional desktop with a variety of useful applications in only 50 megs of space. You don't need hundreds of megs on a CD or an entire DVD with gigs of stuff, most of which most normal users will never use anyway. Browser, chat, email, media player, some sort of text editor, done.
Windows, no idea, haven't used it since 98se, which could run on some pretty marginally specced machines.
Re:Perl (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that a *really* good metric for a language? O'reilly is pretty good as companies go, but they are still after the bottom line. And the bottom line is: bigger "quick references" will sell better and for more money.
And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
See, just like I told you.
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library.
Is there a language that, once learned, you need a big set of reference books? I use both Perl and Python (and 4 or 5 others). I have no books on Python. I have the camel book for Perl. I still find Java's javadoc to be the best language reference around. I no longer program in Java so that's just an interesting side note at this point.
Re:AbiWord FTW (Score:2, Interesting)
And this ofcourse only holds for the Linux version, not for our native Windows version for example.
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Interesting)
The simple point you're making: Hardware is for us to USE, not "NOT USE". Sure, we don't want our applications to be completely wasteful. But if software developers can focus more on useful features and code with less bugs, I'd rather they do that than save a few megs of RAM.
Calendar.com - 896 bytes (Score:2, Interesting)
C:\Bin>dir calendar.com
Volume in drive C is XPPro
Volume Serial Number is 5851-2646
Directory of C:\Bin
10/13/2006 11:46 PM 896 Calendar.com
1 File(s) 896 bytes
0 Dir(s) 23,780,888,576 bytes free
C:\Bin>calendar
September 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
C:\Bin>calendar nov 1963
November 1963
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
C:\Bin>
Good Point (Score:2, Interesting)
One example I can think of is Opera VS Firefox. If you read the comments around any Opera story around here, you'll notice how some FF fans will say that Opera is bloated despite its speed and smaller footprint. At the same time, those who use Opera will complain about FF's memory leaks and its bugging down with huge pages.
Among the examples cited by the story's submitter, I prefer Media Player Classic because it's faster while providing better image quality. There's also Notepad++ as an alternative PHP/ASP.net/HTML editor and XnView for image management and conversion. I also like Amarok and WinAmp. Although they're not light applications, I prefer them over iTunes.
Re:Oh! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Mother of All Bloat-Free Software... (Score:5, Interesting)
main() { write(1, "hello, world", 12); }
Even though I'm (at least mostly) joking, the difference is real, and at one time would have given serious consideration to doing things this way in real code. In reality, you've shown exactly how a lot of bloat really happens. Much of it stems from people using large, general-purpose libraries where they didn't really need them. In some cases (including this one) they didn't really even gain much from the library. The C stdio library provides buffering that can help speed when/if it reduces the number of times your program calls the OS write routine. In this case, the code calls write exactly once either way, so it's gained you nothing, but cost you extra memory usage and data copying, as well as making your program quite a bit larger.
Re:Lynx? (Score:3, Interesting)
Weird, I go to the *normal* front page, click Document Size on Firefoxes Web Developer add-on, and this is the result:
Documents (1 file) 15 KB (67 KB uncompressed)
Images (34 files) 31 KB
Objects (0 files)
Scripts (4 files) 68 KB (290 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (3 files) 36 KB
Total 150 KB (424 KB uncompressed)
So where's your extra 176KB in the light version, and does Lynx have gzip support?
Re:GIMP tile cache size (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they would merely reject any patches on one of the spurious grounds you have noted above: that the submitter had not fixed the problem on Irix (so they would refuse to fix it for 99% of users), or the patch would make things worse on multi-user systems (so they would refuse to fix it for 80% of users), or the submitter had not proven beyond a shadow of doubt that he had found a completely optimal strategy (so they would refuse to make it considerably better). Let's be honest - the GIMP developers do not care about end users, they only care about massaging their own egos and pretending that GIMP is a serious competitor to Photoshop.
Re:Xtree Gold (Score:4, Interesting)
Pure Beauty, I haven't used it in many, many years, but I bet my fingers would remember the keys in 5 minutes of using it again.
I also remember the things that finally killed it for me. Lack (or late) support for long filenames, and the terrible windows port... man, those people should *have* written windows!
Is there a linux port?
Wannabe web browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Blender, Emacs, Fluxbox (Score:3, Interesting)
Measured in features compared to other programms of the same type, Blender is easyly the most bloat-free software ever. Version 2.0 fit on two 3.5" HD Disks and had an incredible featureset. The GUI uses OpenGL and is blazingly fast compared to other 3D progamms. It has gotten larger (ca. 10MB to download) but still beats others hands down.
Emacs
Once the most bloated piece of software in existance, Emacs now is the leanest Work enviroment available with the most power. After 10 years I've finally started to learn Emacs and it's all I expected it to be. Usage and control is far-out bizar at some points (marking a section takes several steps that are so counter intuitive it's unbelievable) but the power and available featureset is impressive.
Fluxbox
My favorite non-bloat Window Manager on X. Fast, neat and unique features, looks good. My prime choice for non-KDE/Gnome setups.
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh! (Score:2, Interesting)
it's a universal binary.
Re:Vi (Score:3, Interesting)
:syn off
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Perl (Score:2, Interesting)
http://faq.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What_s_the_diff
Re:Perl (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, if it identifies me as an outsider, I'd probably capitalize it even if it wasn't an acronym. I certainly wouldn't want to be mistaken for a PERL user!
Re:Lynx? (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to respect the wisdom of the protocol designers in making them usable even by a manually telnetting human.
Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate this 'rule of thumb' that people keep trotting out that we only use x% of software, for some low value of 'x'. That's simply not true, so stop bringing it up like it's a valid argument for anything.
I keep hearing this bullshit if from Unix zealots, from people flogging 'thin' or 'web 2.0' products, and from Luddites that are 'perfectly happy' running WordPerfect 5.1 on their OS/2 machine.
Lets think of a simple scenario. Imagine a fictional company MiniSoft Software that makes a word processor. They advertise that their program has 100 features! Of course, you know that most users will only use about 10% of that most of the time, and maybe an occasional 1% rarely. So why have the other 89 features in there? Most users won't be using it!
What this kind of oversimplified 'analysis' misses is that that '1%' extra is different for every user. Glenda in marketing might use the 'mail merge' feature once a month. The payroll officer might have to use the database integration feature. The warehouse manager might be using the barcode printing. The international sales office might use the Unicode multi-lingual features.
Once you add up all of those '1%' pieces, all too often, you end up with... 100 features or so. This is why MiniSoft Office is so 'bloated'. Because somewhere, out there, there's someone who uses the macro functionality, or the right-to-left text input, or the dynamic forms, or... something. It's not bloat... it's what users expect from their software -- that the same consistent product be useful for all of the staff in an entire business.
So to reiterate, just because YOU only personally use the "bold" and "italic" buttons on the toolbar doesn't mean that someone else can get by with only those two buttons.
Get used to it, because software is only going to get bigger and more 'bloated', not less.