#software bloat

[athelind]

As I ranted above, MS Office 365 has recently started defaulting to embedding whole editable spreadsheets and graphics when you paste from Excel or Visio into Word.

To be clear about what that means:

Unless you jump through some hoops to convert to a graphics format or a Word table, you've got a whole executable copy of Visio/Excel/Whatever embedded in your Word document.

You know how programmers love to mess around and see just what random Internet of Things electronic device they can load a playable copy of DOOM into? It's like that, yeah. They're trying to run DOOM in Word.

Poking around to see if I should upgrade my ram and:

16 gig for word processing????

[spieluhrzeit]

i can't believe a worldwide outage is what's convincing me to move to linux, thanks microsoft and kiitos finland 🫡

[cazort]

So I agree with the criticism of Microsoft here 100% but I gotta be real with you guys. People have been overstating the difficulty of using Linux for years. A few years ago I installed Linux on a laptop for my 70+ year old mom and she loves it and has been using it ever since. Me, personally? I've been using Linux exclusively in my business since 2008. I almost never have any compatibility issues.

I've set Linux up to connect to appleshare servers on local networks, to mount Windows filesystems, I've opened ArcGIS files using open source software, I've imported MS SQL and Oracle databases into MySQL or PostGreSQL, I've opened countless word and excel documents in LibreOffice.

Compatibility is a non issue and has not been an issue with 99%+ of the stuff I do, for 15+ years.

Linux is easier to install than windows. Its like a thumb drive and clicking through a few boxes.

Stop talking about linux like it was the year 2000 and was legitimately hard to install and there were major compatibility issues.

These are things of the past. At this point far more ppl are held back from using Linux by the misconceptions than by any practical limitation.

I talked about the problem of Windows system requirements being too damn high before, and how the windows 10 to 11 jump is especially bad. Like the end of Windows 10 is coming october 2025, and it will be a massive problem. And this article gives us some concrete numbers for how many computers that can't update from win10 to 11.

And it's 240 million. damn. “If these were all folded laptops, stacked one on top of another, they would make a pile 600 km taller than the moon.” the tech analysis company quoted in the article explains.

So many functioning computers that will be wasted. And it's all because people don't wanna switch to a Linux distro with sane system requirements and instead buy a new computer.

Like if you own one of these 240 million windows 10 computers, Just be an environmentally responsible non-wasteful person and switch that computer to Linux instead of just scrapping it because Microsoft says it's not good enough.

[datastate]

every time i look for laptops i get so tired

[sophie-baybey]

I don’t think gaming is the main thing people care about here my laptop is nearly unusable because it can’t load a browser or boot any program in less that three minutes like if I can get Minecraft started I can play just fine but I can’t log in to discord or watch a streamed show because my laptop can’t handle websites

ive used 10+ year old non-gaming laptops that can run websites just fine. If you can run minecraft, but not your browser, there's something else wrong with your computer you need to get checked out.

[luulapants]

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

[pumpkinstep]

I use this software.

It's an easy way to turn off settings in windows that you'd normally have to put a bit of effort in to find. Settings like trackers and a bunch of other stuff.

It works for windows 10

Revo Uninstaller is a great program for force uninstalling programs you couldn't uninstall otherwise. Like Microsoft Edge.

If you use it to uninstall edge and its not finding the program when you search for it, you'll have to open edge, then use the target mode which allows you to select desired programs manually.

target the opened Microsoft edge window and it'll start the process.

The cool thing about this program is that is does a hard uninstall, completely wipes out everything related to the program and it's stuff in the registry.

might I add, if you uninstall Microsoft edge, it will remove copilot as well. I've done this and it's been a few months since then I think. I've updated my laptop a few times and it hasn't come back. though if you want to avoid edge from coming back with an update, here's a vid on the more indepth process of its removal.

Something I usually do is go into my app manager or program manager window and read through what all is installed. I delete anything I didn't install myself and doesn't have a purpose. If you're not tech savvy, have a web browser open to search for programs you don't recognize. if it looks necessary, leave it alone. Usually windows is pretty good about not letting you uninstall important programs but it's good to play it safe.

Doing this whenever you notice a sudden dip in pc performance is a great way to catch unwanted programs that may have slipped in with something you downloaded recently. Paired with a good anti malware program like Malwarebytes, youre pretty much golden.

last tip.

It's a pretty good practice to Optimize and Defrag your harddrive regularly. It basically does a clean sweep of your harddrive by deleting unnecessary files.

Here's a link to instructions on how to do that. When you set about this process, you should have an option of to what degree the clean up is done (meaning what files is targeted), how regularly this process happens.

It usually deletes residual files, stuff in your downloads folder, trash folder, and stuff like that. you'll get to see what all is there when you do it before you confirm the clean up.

After doing all that, you've got yourself a nice and clean pc that should work better than it did before.

All the programs I linked to are free and can be used without paying for them.

I've been super into computers since I was kid so these are pretty solid methods of pc maintainance on the virtual side. If you have a proper box pc, and I guess if you're feeling brave enough to open up your laptop, don't forget to clean use an air duster to clean out your consul.

I promise you, nothing will help more than a clean pc and cooling fans.

i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

[frog707]

Fewer features, please

Today I learned that a "snow" release (in the context of Apple, at least) means a software release that removes more features than it adds. I don't know much about Apple software, but in general this sounds like a potentially valuable strategy, particularly for mature projects suffering from bloat.

[gagande]

PureCode company | Prevents unnecessary complexity

Applying the DRY method to reduce redundancies, alongside CSS shorthand and combining elements where feasible, prevents unnecessary complexity and bloat in stylesheets.

[fictionz]

Photopea and Ezgif make me wonder what app developers think they're doing with their cumbersome standalone products.

[cappurrccino]

it's fun how every time windows takes it upon itself to update it either crashes my computer or just makes every single program run like absolute dogshit

[orifu]

i think its so funny that like half of all ppl i see in lectures have macbooks instead of windows. how did microsoft fumble the bag so bad that compsci students would rather have like 10% the software instead of using windows

[antifataylorswift]

Kubernetes is fun* because you can use it for multiple years and still stumble across kinds of resources you've never heard of before when they cause extremely obscure operational issues for parts of your system that are four components removed from the actual resource. Naturally this happens at 3 in the morning.

* Kubernetes is not fun.

[eggman-is-fat-mkay]

don't forget the rust crate segfaulting your program instead of returning an error if it tries to parse bad data because the underlying C library has a bug in it. someone wrote an issue on the rust crate's github but the dev was just like “the C code is well outside my jurisdiction. WONTFIX” with no link to a corresponding issue on the C side because libsnorble2 has not been developed in public for the better part of 5 years

there's also a separate rust crate caled rusquimble which is a pure Rust implementation of squimblization, but it advertises big about its flexibilty, which in practice means its API is about as user friendly as v1.0 hyper. it contains approximately 7000 structs, all of which are user facing, and a minimal hello world example is 50 lines of boilerplate in which you open all of the relevant files and asynchronous TCP connections yourself and then wrap them in 7 different structs from the rusquimble crate along with some enum variants with horrifyingly long names to tell them what to do, all of which have constructors which can fail, three of which are asynchronous for absolutely no reason, and one of which returns an error type that doesn't implement Display meaning that not even the anyhow crate can save you now.

Also it only supports async-std as the asynchronous runtime even though literally every other crate in existence has standardized on tokio.

don't forget the rusquimble crate having no documentation apart from that single 50 line hello world example and whatever else rustdoc was able to autogenerate, minus of course the handful of modules that the developers put #[doc(hidden)] on (which is about 80% of the API)

every software is like. your mission-critical app requires you to use the scrimble protocol to squeeb some snorble files for sprongle expressions. do you use:

libsnorble-2-dev, a C library that the author only distributes as source code and therefore must be compiled from source using CMake

Squeeb.js, which sort of has most of the features you want, but requires about a gigabyte of Node dependencies and has only been in development for eight months and has 4.7k open issues on Github

Squeeh.js, a typosquatting trojan that uses your GPU to mine crypto if you install it by mistake

Sprongloxide, a Rust crate beloved by its fanatical userbase, which has been in version 0.9.* for about four years, and is actually just a thin wrapper for libsnorble-2-dev

GNU Scrimble, a GPLv3-licensed command-line tool maintained by the Free Software Foundation, which has over a hundred different flags, and also comes with an integrated Lisp interpreter for scripting, and also a TUI-based Pong implementation as an "easter egg", and also supports CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, XLSX, and even HTML files, but does not actually come with support for squeebing snorble files for ideological reasons. it does have a boomeresque drawing of a grinning meerkat as its logo, though

Microsoft Scrimble Framework Core, a .NET library that has all the features you need and more, but costs $399 anually and comes with a proprietary licensing agreement that grants Microsoft the right to tattoo advertisements on the inside of your eyelids

snorblite, a full-featured Perl module which is entirely developed and maintained by a single guy who is completely insane and constantly makes blog posts about how much he hates the ATF and the "woke mind-virus", but everyone uses it because it has all the features you need and is distributed under the MIT license

Google Squeebular (deprecated since 2017)

[bonetrousle]

fooken 'ell my computer is turning 7 years old soon. That's mad. Granted I've made a few changes to it since then, but I wonder how much longer it will tolerate my shenanigans!!

[titleknown]

While I really hate the narrative of "tech bros" because of how it conflates shitty CEOs with non-shitty base-level programmers, and how it conflates Dunning-Kruger-y early adopters with people who Know Their Shit about computers...

...On the AI art issue, I will say, there is probably a legit a culture clash between people who primarily specialize in programming and people who primarily specialize in art.

Because, like, while in the experience of modern working illustrators a free commons has ended up representing a Hobbseyan experience of "a war of all against all" that's a constant threat to making a living, in software from what I can tell it's kinda been the reverse.

IE, freedom of access to shared code/information has kinda been seen as A Vital Thing wrt people's abilities to do their job at a core level. So, naturally, there's going to be some very different reactions to the morality of scraped data online.

And, it's probably the same reason that a lot of the creative commons movement came from the free software movement.

And while I agree a lot with the core principles of these movements, it's also probably unfortunately why they so often come off as tone-deaf and haven't really made that proper breakthrough wrt fighting against copyright bloat.

It also really doesn't help that, in terms of treatment by capital, for most of our lives programmers have been Mother's Special Little Boy whereas artists (especially online independent artists post '08 crash) have been treated as The Ratboy We Keep In The Basement And Throw Scraps To.

So, it make sense the latter would have resentment wrt the former...