My Battle Against Bloat Is Over
28 Feb 2021My Dearest Mad-Readers,
I have been absent for quite a while. This is not because I was out of ideas, certainly not, but because I was not able to find the motivation within me to create content and publish it. The current sanitary situation, as for most of you I would suppose, has seriously been getting on my nerves. I have had to force myself to get back to writing this. Do not misunderstand, I still love blogging and making videos. We are only living the beginning of this adventure all together. My return should be proof enough! Anyway, let us dig into the subject of this video. A lot has happened in almost 2 months and I cannot speak forever, so I will summarize.
A Quick Update
- I have drastically restructured my GitHub page. I was in need of tidying all my computer files, projects, and website accounts the other day. I then decided it was time to remove most of the work I have on GitHub and archive it offline.
- I have been working on a services page which will summarize all the professional services I wish to offer. It also has taken time some time, but I officially am the owner of a company. This essentially means I can legally earn money with my online activities such as blogging, writing, translating, teaching…
- As surprising as it might be, I am still a Gentoo user. My system is not perfect but it will certainly never be. I am rather happy where I am, to be honest. This does not mean I will not test out SlackWare and Void in the future, or even a BSD system. However, I have no intention of changing OS at the moment. Have comfort and laziness gotten the best of me, I will let you decide…
- For those of you who would be curious about my language learning journey, I will say this : I have grown much better at Italian. One of my main activities these days is to watch shows in Italian and learn vocabulary. I have not been able to go back to Italy however, and I seriously doubt I will go back this year, at least as an au-pair.
- I decided to delete my Patreon account for the time being. I see myself more as a hobbyist than a professional blogger and YouTuber and it may remain this way for some time. In my opinion, it would not be honest to ask more than punctual donations from my readers and viewers.
My War Against Bloat Is Over
I recently fought the last battle in what I like to call “my war against bloat”. Obviously, bloated software does exist and I would not love Linux so much if I did not believe it was a real issue. It suffices to play around with Windows 10's desktop environment for a few hours to realize that bloatness is a reality. However, I am no longer absolutely convinced that this quest has no end. We, as users, should be the ones to set some limits. Would you not agree?
At some point, bloatness only is an illusion of the mind!
It does not matter so much in what programming language your favorite piece of software was written. Take Qtile for instance. I was happy with it but left it because it is written in Python instead of C. It worked perfectly and I had nothing to complain about. I probably switched away from it because of peer-pressure and this is ridiculous. Even though I learned a lot and would never regret my previous decision, I am now taking a step back. I am open to using Qtile again and, prepare yourself, desktop environments.
Overall, I believe our problem has several origins: the first one has to be peer-pressure, but I would be refusing to see the obvious if I stopped here. Underneath this pressure, there is something else hiding which is much more vicious: identification. You did read well.
People identify with the tools they use, and computer programs make no exceptions. Programmers identify and then define themselves with whatever piece of software they like most. All the memes circulating on Reddit are living proof of my words: Python is for beginners (or data scientist) C is synonym for efficiency, Rust is the most recent popular kid in school, Ubuntu is for noobs, Arch is for nerds without a life... This is only one side of the coin, but you get the overall idea. We let these tools define ourselves when one should merely use them as a means to an end.
Strive not to identify with the tools you use!
You would only end up hurt. This does not mean you should be a jack of all trades and never master anything but it does make it easier to use the tools you have for what they are and switch to another more appropriate tool when you need to reach another goal.
My Latest YouTube Video
Sign-Off
As a conclusion, I would like to say that I still do not intend to close a blind eye on actually bloated software. Those who accuse programs such as sudo or qtile to be bloat might be extremists, but they still are right in the sense that we need to keep striving for better performance. If we all consume less, our planet might thank us for it someday. Do you not agree?
I hope this article helped you understand what I recently understood. If you agree or disagree, feel free to share your opinion in the comments.
Have a nice one,
Phil.
