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?"
Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
As for general favorite bloat-free software, I'd have to go with
Should I buy that new sports car I've had my eye on? y
Am I really a good person, even after all those felonies? y
Should I have another beer? y
Am I sober enough to drive? y
Do you love me? y
Oh yes, you little scamp, I love you too! y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
^C
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Freakin' wastrel! That's why they made ">". Not vim. Not ed. Not cat. ">".
"cat". Hrmph.
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
My machine is quad core and has 1.5TB of disk and 4GB of RAM so I think it can be safely assumed that everyone else does too...and that every application should assume it can have all of it. I mean, it's time to take these command-line utils into the modern age.
I'm also looking for the iTrue replacement for
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Insightful)
doubt it. ever heard of ulimit? any self-respecting unix admin worth salt would limit resources to unprivileged users/applications on their production servers.
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll have to go out on a limb and say I dropped expectations of absolutely minimal HD and RAM space for EVERY app I use, after continually coming up against programs that would go all out in being light in resource use, but couldn't do their job because of it.
Some are just what the original poster ordered - vim is certainly one of the good cases, it's powerful and manages a light footprint, and there are plenty of other tools that do phenomenal work whether it's running on eight xeons, or a single low-end 386.
One of the opposite cases is some forms of image work when comparing apps like Gimp and Photoshop. In some areas, Gimp is WAY lighter on resource use. I'd perform work on 250MB image, and gimp would use little more RAM than that, no matter how it was configured for RAM use. This would normally be seen as a really good thing for Gimp.
What of Photoshop? It wanted 2GB of RAM to work at maximum speed. That might sound like serious bloat on photoshop's part, but when working on large images it meant two orders of magnitude difference in speed. Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
(That doesn't mean PS was incapable when stuck with ONLY 256MB RAM. Then it'd bog down just like Gimp)
What I want are apps that use the resources I provide them *wisely*. There's more to that than just being totally frugal. Seen too many people running big-RAM systems and being proud of having their OS use just a hundred or two MB out of gigs. Why? Resources are free once they're installed, may as well use them when they genuinely can help you work.
GIMP tile cache size (Score:5, Informative)
You can set this value to 4 GB and GIMP will happily use as much memory as you have. And it will be much, much faster when working with large images. As a rule of thumb, you should set this value to around 80% of your available memory.
Re:GIMP tile cache size (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a compelling reason that the default behavior is not 80% of your available memory?
Re:GIMP tile cache size (Score:5, Informative)
There are several reasons, some of which are historical:
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:Oh! (Score:5, Informative)
Utilities:
7-Zip (Compression/Decompression)
Editpad (Tabbed Notepad replacement)
SequoiaView (Creates square treemaps of file system)
Multimedia:
VLC (Plays Anything)
Exact Audio Copy (Perfect CD Ripping)
LAME (High Quality MP3 Compression)
Audacity (Record off Line Inputs or Loopback)
Internet:
uTorrent (Bittorrent)
Firefox with FireFTP (Browswer, FTP)
Thunderbird with WebMail (Email Client)
TortiseSVN (Windows Shell Integration for Subversion)
Putty (Telnet/SSH)
Games:
OpenArena (Open source extension of Quake 3 codebase)
Battle of Wesnoth (Open source strategic fantasy game)
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Informative)
V, the file viewer [fileviewer.com]
Foxit Reader [foxitsoftware.com] for viewing PDFs
Crimson Editor [crimsoneditor.com] for text files, though I more often use emacs.
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Steinberg Wavelab (audio editor)
Reaper (DAW)
DVDFab Platinum
I'm not a programmer, so I can't testify to the efficiency of the code or anything, but I use every single one of the features of the above programs. By that measure, it makes them the opposite of bloatware.
Here's one that I just downloaded today, after being prompted by an earlier Slashdot article:
Opera 9.5 (I've been using it for less than an hour and it's already my favorite browser). Maybe there's some bloat somewhere in Opera. Maybe there are some of you fiber-eaters who believe that being able to render javascript automatically makes it bloatware. But this bitch is FAST and it seemed to install in the time it took me to click the FINISH button.
And finally, my favorite, slick tool for breaching the walls of the Corrupt Castle of the Copyright Cabal...uTorrent! It's more than just a torrent download manager, it's a weapon for fighting fascism!
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox, Thunderbird, TortiseSVN are anything but Bloat-Free.
In the past six months to a year FireFox, Thunderbird regularly take up 130 MB by themselves. I once had Thunderbird manage RSS feeds.... That was a mistake! And don't even ask me about how SLOW Firefox has gotten with larger HTML pages.
TortiseSVN has this annoying habit that it has to cache everything and if you have any SVN projects of any size it takes ages to do anything.
What annoys me about these applications is that they take the attitude, "oh lets just load it into RAM after all everybody has enough." I get annoyed because I run Virtual Machines and these apps keep slowing everything down.
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.
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
I use ed at least once a week, if not more.
Re:Oh! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh! (Score:4, Funny)
Lynx? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only alternative is the mobile interface, which is horribly crippled (top five comments only? the only good thing about slashdot is the comments!).
The content on Slashdot *should* be ideal for reading on the way to work on my mobile - content that can be laid out easily in a linear fashion, lots of content on a single page so I can keep on reading through blackspots, no pictures - but the way it's laid out makes it way too annoying (and this is with an unlimited 3G data plan).
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lynx? (Score:4, Funny)
Layne
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 ge
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:Perl (Score:4, Informative)
If you want minimal, try out UnLambda [madore.org] or Pax [geocities.com]. Unlambda is so minimal the functions (except a few built-ins) don't even get names. As a purely functional language, it also lacks variables. Despite this, it's Turing complete, so it can do anything you can do in such bloated messes as C++, PERL or Python. Pax is also Turing complete, and the page referenced above includes complete source code to its implementation, in a total of 175 lines of code (including white space, nice indenting, etc.)
What's truly sad is that even though it was apparently invented with the specific intent of being obfuscated, Pax programs are generally much more readable than most PERL. Oh, and just to address a couple of your other points: Pax doesn't need a library to do pattern matching -- in fact, the language is basically built entirely around pattern equations. The tutorial and reference manual together work out to just over 200 lines of text. Most of that is the USTL reference manual mentioned above.
Much as I hate to, I have to admit that even compared to PERL, programs in UnLambda are somewhat obfuscated -- though once you get used to its syntax, they're not quite as bad as they initially appear (rather the opposite of PERL in that respect).
At a little over a meg... (Score:5, Insightful)
minimalist (Score:5, Informative)
I'd like to see this list include things that are conveniently free of spyware/trojans, too!
Re:minimalist (Score:4, Informative)
Bonzi Buddy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bonzi Buddy (Score:5, Funny)
Vi (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vi (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as we're only talking about old-skool vi, I totally agree with you.
Some of these wonky new vi's with their fancy colouring and extra modes which coincide with legacy vi commands are evil. I've been using vi for almost 20 years -- and when I find myself in a new vi in a mode I don't know where I am, something has gone horribly wrong. If you're going to add modes and stuff, make sure that there is no bloody legacy vi command you've screwed up.
There's nothing more sad than watching a guy who got coddled with emacs all through school suddenly finding himself on a customer site on a machine which only has an old-fashioned vi. They can't do anything, then they're asking the Solaris admin to install some software so he can do something simple.
Everyone should be at least a little familiar with vi. When the fit hits the shan, sometimes it's all you've got to get out of the doo doo.
Cheers
AbiWord FTW (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, now I'm on OS X, and the Mac port is fugly, so I haven't touched it in a while.
I've got a summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I've got a summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple II (Score:5, Funny)
* 300: ad 30 c0 20 ed fd 4c 00 03
* 300g
Hours of random entertainment!
In case anyone wonders (Score:5, Informative)
20 FD ED: JSR $FDED - prints the content of the Accumulator to the screen - since what you read from the speaker line is technically random, it prints a random character to the screen - potentially including arrow keys and bell characters...
4C 00 03: JMP $0300 enough said.
Putty! (Score:5, Informative)
Foobar (Score:3, Informative)
TinyApps.org (Score:5, Informative)
If you're running Windows, I also like Sumatra PDF
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/ [kowalczyk.info]
(not sure if that's listed at the former or no, which is why I specifically mention it --- the balance of my preferred small programs are)
William
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Many of the apps were chosen because they are small and light. Others have been stripped to the minimum, so that they can fit comfortably on removable media (e.g. OpenOffice Portable is 69 MB instead of the usual 100 MB).
The PortableApps Suite is only 89MB and covers a
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.
Re:MS Paint (Score:5, Informative)
The Answer: (Score:4, Funny)
How many programs for Windows have existed almost unchanged for as long as Windows has existed.
The kernel. *rimshot*
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Re:MS Paint (Score:5, Funny)
YOU: "MS Paint sucks. Buy a new computer so you can take screenshots more easily"
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Weird criteria (Score:5, Insightful)
I absolutely abhor the iTunes interface. It is 2nd last on my list of good music management programs, one small notch above Music Match Jukebox. Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways which for some reason involve playlists. I gave up after half an hour and just installed RockBox [rockbox.org] on my Nano so I could be free from it's horrors.
I would imagine that iTunes is great for the casual user that doesn't need nor want much MANUAL control over their music library, but for more advanced users the non-standard UI (on Windows) and strange "simplified" ways of doing simple things make it near useless.
Re:Weird criteria (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm. I don't have any playlists in iTunes (I prefer dealing with albums), and I have zero problems with simply dragging an album (or other batch of songs) onto my iPod in the pane on the left. I guess that's too difficult and "roundabout" for some people, though...
Re:Weird criteria (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. I believe this to be the main reason why myself and others like me (I see a few in this thread) loathe it. I want to be able to organize my music myself in a way that makes sense to me (and often, only me).
I don't consider this to be a waste of time at all, as I enjoy the occasional walk through my library to add new music or re-discover old favorites.
In the end, I think to each his own. iTunes is simply not for everyone and neither is any other piece of software, be it made by Apple or not.
Re:Weird criteria (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does iTunes have to have like 3 services running on my computer at all times? Its absurd. iTunes is not user friendly either, it just seems that way because other media players are even worse.
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some code is just bloated, but most of the author's examples are not in that category.
Re: (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-f ormats functionality. Apple should've named it wTunes or something, just to make it clear that it's not the real deal.
iTunes is awesome. iTunes for Win
uTorrent (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my nomination is for uTorrent, and if anyone knows of a similar package for OSX I would love to hear it.
Re:uTorrent (Score:4, Informative)
tee (Score:4, Funny)
The way it should be. It's name is it's documentation too.
gus
My list (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>
Foxit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Foxit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's it. I'd like to be able to compare it to Adobe Craprobat, but I've deleted all vestiges of it from my machines. Foxit is quick, small, and stable--all the things Adobe can't manage.
Pine, of course (Score:5, Informative)
Not an "application" (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, as the rest of modern desktop Linux has bloated to the point where Konsole and Gnome Terminal aren't bottlenecks any more I've moved away from it in favor of tabs, but I used to only use rxvt instead of heavier alternatives. Gnome Terminal in particular used to have visible lag, and I'm a lot more tolerant of that stuff in a multimedia app than in a freaking shell.
Zim (Score:3, Interesting)
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pr
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
ZuluPad is similar, but more advanced in some respects. 'Course, I wrote it, so I'm a bit biased.
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)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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 favs (Score:4, Insightful)
My Favoritse (Score:3, Interesting)
Rockbox. (Score:3, Informative)
Great care is taken to keep the core as small as possible, while maintaining focus on the fundamental goal of being the best DAP firmware possible.
Xvid vs. DivX (Score:5, Informative)
Well nobody's really chimed in with IM yet (Score:5, Informative)
You avoid all of the bloat of AIM and MSN Messenger (which is now beyond ridiculous) plus you rid yourself of the need to install several messaging clients which further saves space and startup time plus it keeps your system tray (in windows) much cleaner. And the best part, it's available as open source for Windows and Linux!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
uTorrent (Score:5, Informative)
219kb for an incredibly fast, RAM-efficient, full-blown, full-featured GUI Torrent client, with Web administration, scheduling, and all the stuff.
Now if the whole world could only code as well as uTorrent's author...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:uTorrent (Score:4, Insightful)
Some examples (Score:4, Informative)
Encryption: TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) takes less than 2 megs to hold the main executable along with both 32 and 63bit XP/Vista drivers. The Wizzard is a separate program that can optionally be included.
Browsers: Excluding text-only and phone browsers, Opera is a clear winner for the memory footprint. It's much slower on JS though, so I'm waiting to see which improvements they made with 9.5 on that.
Operating systems: The same Linux OS that runs my highly-powered workstations also runs on my 200Mhz 8MB ram/4MB flash router. It's just a matter of what you compile in. For me this seems like a winner too. Just look for tinny distros (Slackware with custom install is my reference as full-featured yet tiny distro, but there are also much smaller ones too) of just do it yourself with LFS.
Opera (Score:3, Informative)
(you know you are addicted to tabs when...)
Logitech mouse drivers on the other hands are memory monsters
Still looking for a low-memory antivirus that requieres absolutely no user interaction. Grisoft AVG uses little memory, but keeps requiring occasional user interaction for updates, so I hesitate to install it on someone elses machine. Clamwin is worse in that department however.
Phoenix (Score:3, Funny)
Farbrausch (Score:4, Informative)
check out some of their 4k and 64k demos and prepare to be amazed. fr-30 candytron is particularly good. or fr-025 the popular demo.
You can download their stuff here [farbrausch.de]
Honorable mention: BeOS (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot to do with it but marvel at its boot time and launch a bunch of QuickTime movies. ArtPaint gave me a glimpse of how fast Photoshop could be, but of course a port never came. (Plus ArtPaint crashed a lot.) The 3D music editing demo app was great but it, too, crashed a lot. I'm glad Apple went with NeXT for the basis of OS X because it's more of a "real" UNIX as compared to the single-user BeOS, but I'd probably just as happy in most ways and happier in some [google.com] if JLG hadn't been so greedy. [google.com] Of course, no NeXT means no Steve, and no iMac, iLife, iPod, or iPhone--just freakishly fast beige boxes and probably no market share.
OK, got a little off topic here, but the point remains--if you don't want bloat, check out BeOS. (And get a time machine.) Or QNX--they used to have a demo version that fit a GUI, browser, and web server onto a 1.44 MB floppy.
mplayer for video (not wmp!) (Score:4, Informative)
Portable Apps are (usually) Bloat-Free (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera (Score:5, Informative)
I switched to Miranda from GAIM (which I switched to from Trillian) and I haven't regretted it for one moment. It's very snappy and responsive, it automatically resizes vertically depending on how many contacts are online, it appears and disappears with a single click of the tray icon, it auto-updates the base program as well as the plugins... I could go on and on.
Give it a try. It's free! http://www.miranda-im.org/ [miranda-im.org]
Re:Opera (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two reasons for bloat: Accidental (i.e. shitty programming) and deliberate (adding pointless features.) By buying into the "let's just throw money at it until the problem goes away" mentality, you're encouraging bad programming and endless marketing-driven upgrades. It's a hundred bucks on RAM now, another hundred on a new hard drive, and then next year it'll be a new CPU. You're going to end up spending about $500-1000 per year on maintaining the same level of productivity as you've always had. This is key!
Windows 2000 required a 133MHz processor and 64MB RAM.
Windows XP required a 233MHz processor and 128MB RAM. The ONLY FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE between them was the thumbnail view mode. Everything else was eyecandy and toys, but it wasn't a huge upgrade cost.
Windows Vista requires a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, a DirectX 9-compliant video card, and an internet connection. Oh yeah, and TEN TIMES as much disk space. Now what extra value does Vista provide to you, the end customer? What advantage does Vista give you over XP?
Consider Office suites. Office 97 ran on a 486, with 12MB RAM for all features. Office 2007 now requires a 500MHz processor and 256MB RAM, and contains very few features that weren't already in Office 97. Moreso, only a tiny fraction of those features are actually used by any appreciable chunk of the population.
The ONLY REASON to keep writing bloated software is to make you constantly spend more money staying exactly where you are, and your answer is to reward them by spending that money. Bloatware is capitalism gone wrong. It's forced consumption (and the forced aspect is getting worse with OSes now requiring online license activation and continued polling), and so much of the population is EAGER beyond words to consume while getting no value.
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: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?