Lots of people keep using the word "bloat" to refer to Linux as opposed to Windows, which I find bizarre given that it's long been a criticism in the other direction.

Since the word is used mainly as an insult due to people having emotional attachments to technology, the real question in my mind is how did you not find it bizarre on every use.

Or I guess another way to say it is that "bloated" is only a measurement of the speaker's disdain for the software under question. It has little relationship with any actual quality measurement, generally. Bizarre on its face, to me.

Man after years of hearing how bloated Windows is compared to other OSes, I was expecting my first Windows Phone to be the same. But nope to my surprise it was fast and fluid, even on low end devices! I guess, the same can also be said about Win8/Win10 compared to Vista/Win7.

Bloat seems like dirt that accumulates overtime. A little bit of cleanup and optimization can sometimes do magic.

Bloat and legacy support are two sides of the same coin.

Microsoft chose one answer to that, Apple another.

I think Windows Phone is a clear example that Microsoft has technical chops when starting clean, it just lacks business willpower to make decisions that favor performance over support.

Yeah, I would genuinely like to know what all is considered to be bloat within the Unix space. If anyone could point to some information about this I'd be curious.

X11, KDE, GNOME, GCC, Emacs, Mozilla? Any huge project I guess. The GNU command line tools are not as lean as the BSD ones but so what?

They also generally have more (useful) features than the BSD ones.

Not only that but they include more documentation inside the binary. Someone also pointed out to me one time that some features in some GNU utils are only possible to have if they are implemented in the binary, rather as a separate program.

Well, generally speaking nothing is impossible, but it's often more efficient to put the extra features in the same binary. However this "bloat" is nothing compared to your typical desktop or programming environment.

I disagree. 1. Unix-like environments are (or rather were before systemd) kinda similar and once you drop a shell - good to go. Even with powershell Microsoft have gone down the route of version/feature pinning. If you plan to maintain at least Windows 7/Server 2003 in your scripts - well, powershell 2 is the highest you can aim, bye bye new features, welcome bloat. Red Hat while shipping old versions still backports features. 2. The only thing in Unix-likes being standard are core utils and OpenSSH. Everything else can be anything (SysV/upstart/Systemd, Gnome/KDE/tiny_tiling_wm, bash/zsh) and we are actually deprecating older technologies for new ones (quite often changing the name). Due to ELTS (extremely long term support, often called legacy cruft) core subsystems are mostly the same (on the outside) in Windows. And if it is a server you can bet it is running IIS and MSSQL. 3. Try using `wmic` shell or `net` util. Unbearable clunkiness of such tools and bearable GUI tools mean that we have very little general scripts/tools to transfer

This isn't the case. WMF is available separately. I just rolled our WMF4 over all our kit and we have PS4 everywhere now including win7 and 2008.

I would really like to see what would be the glorious future of the "dated", and "clunky" Unix-like environment.