Small Light Programs Better

[mooreted]

Maybe I'm old-fashioned or just old. It seems to me small, efficient programs are better than big conglomerate programs that include everything but the kitchen sink. They run better and faster and they don't have a gagillion options I'll never use in my life. The same for desktop or window managers. For instance I like:

Audacious vs Rhythmbox/Amarok/iTunes
AbiWord vs Libre/Word
OpenBox vs Kde/Gnome/Unity/OSX/Windows

And so on.

Was just wondering how many of you feel that software went off the rails long ago with trying to include millions of "features" no one actually needs?

[Rodney9]

I agree. That's why I use Lubuntu on my laptop and Xubuntu on my desktop.

[TeoBigusGeekus]

Maybe I'm old-fashioned or just old. It seems to me small, efficient programs are better than big conglomerate programs that include everything but the kitchen sink. They run better and faster and they don't have a gagillion options I'll never use in my life. The same for desktop or window managers. For instance I like:

Audacious vs Rhythmbox/Amarok/iTunes
AbiWord vs Libre/Word
OpenBox vs Kde/Gnome/Unity/OSX/Windows

And so on.

Was just wondering how many of you feel that software went off the rails long ago with trying to include millions of "features" no one actually needs?

+1 for your thoughts.
More features == perhaps a bit more functionality (when present), some eye candy, but also TONS of additional bugs and more computing resources needed.

We've reached the point when (both in windows and linux) we need half a gig of ram (or more) to do exactly the same things we did a decade ago with 1/5 (1/10?) of that power.

[WasMeHere]

+1
Have fun
Olle

[JRV]

You got that right.

[keithpeter]

+1 most of the time

I must use LibreOffice for presentations and writing handouts though (LibreOffice Maths formula handling is good and fast - yes I do know about LaTeX/TeX/Lyx). Gnumeric has nice graphs, Abiword is much better than it used to be but can't manage the layouts &c yet. I'm watching it though.

I like Firefox for the plugins (Zotero)

The rest is lightish

mtpaint can do the things I need to do to photographs in place of GIMP on the netbook

MOC is just a nice console music player period. I use that on all my linux computers.

[Naiki Muliaina]

I would not say they are generally better as thats subjective to the user. Give me GIMP over MSPaint any day.

[ziekfiguur]

I would not say they are generally better as thats subjective to the user. Give me GIMP over MSPaint any day.

He said mtpaint, not mspaint.

[Flymo]

@KeithPeter - what he said!

Sometimes on very lightweight hardware I find that Midori is the only browser option due to shortage of RAM. But even then, loading todays web pages can eat RAM up bigtime.

[3Miro]

For every task that I have I have a minimal number of features that I need to be efficient. Anything over that is bloat.

The problem is that people have different needs. What works for one person is not enough for another, a huge program would potentially serve more people.

Linux has so much diversity and many people are not taking advantage of it. At one point I was using 5 - 6 distros with all sorts of DE in any possible configuration. I settled at Gentoo + XFCE, but I do use a number of Gnome apps like evince and sometimes Gnome Mplayer.

I think people should do the same, try a whole bunch of stuff and see what works the best. Don't always settle for the defaults.