Hi all,
I hear the term bloated thrown around a lot and not too sure on what causes it. I've been weighing the strengths and weakness with Arch, Debian and Ubuntu. I like how Arch is fast and pretty easy to navigate when something goes wrong. I've always been able to fix errors without relying on much outside help. I liked Debian a lot but found it slightly annoying with the packages being a bit older. Ubuntu was a real eye opener, it requires very little work to get up and running but runs noticeably slower than arch or debian.

I was wondering if I could use the ubuntu server install cd and only put on the bare minimum. I'd have access to that same packages as other ubuntu users and access to all it's easy to use features but without the "bloat". But at what point does a system go from fast to bloated and does ease of use play a big part? I'm going to go ahead and compare it to windows(forgive me :P) and say running process are the one and only thing to slow down a system. Now comparing a debian install to an ubuntu install I notice a lot more things are detected in Ubuntu and there are a heap of GUI tools, but does that slow the system down? They hardly seem like things that are always loaded in the background.

The reason why I'm leaning towards a debian based system is because I see a lot of jobs out there that ask for it. I'm not sure how much I'll get out of Arch in terms of Linux knowledge and problem solving these types of jobs are looking for, I'll let the experts decide on that. I like bleeding edge though and it's something that irked me with debian(not sure if I should try sid).



Thanks for reading.

The term 'bloated' is generally used in regards to the size of applications i.e. if that particular word processor when first installed was say 128mb and in the next release it weighed in at 256mb that app has indeed become bloated. This matters when it comes to the running of said app, it takes longer to start up and can become sluggish and less responsive when used, to compensate you may need to add extra ram, or upgrade to a faster processor etc.

Running processes have more of a performance hit. The more you have running, is the more system resources are being used up. Again this has a knock on effect when running apps, they don't run as efficiently or as quickly as they should.

It's always a good idea to eliminate unnecessary processes and to use 'slimware' instead of 'bloatware' if optimum performance is your goal.

If all I want to do is write a few simple letters and produce a few basic spreadsheets, then using OpenOffice is overkill when there are smaller apps like Siag or Abiword that will do exactly that.

In a lot of cases it's either 'eye-candy' or 'extra functions' that I know I'm not going to use therefore I tend to go for the smallest, lightest, app that gets the job done with little or no fuss or performance issues.

When installing a server machine, do you really need that office package, those gui tools, or those multimedia apps? In fact do you really need a desktop environment at all?