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Comment by ythn | Hacker News Reader

I wish it said that kind of thing in the changelogs more often (in general). I would be much more eager to download updates if I knew the app was getting slimmer, and not fatter.

On a side note, I'm annoyed Skype now forcibly updates itself on app launch. I have no idea how big that app is getting but I just assume it's slowly getting bigger and bigger.

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To be fair to Linux, it does support an ever-growing list of hardware. It’s not exactly lean, but continually increasing in size is hard to avoid in its case...

That could have been avoided if they hadn't been so insistent on all drivers being part of the kernel.

Then again, for as much trouble as that policy causes it is difficult to argue with its success, since Linux supports more hardware than any other open source OS and most proprietary ones too (or all, depending on how you count ancient hardware).

More source code doesn't necessarily result in a bigger compiled kernel. Your distro isn't enabling every single option at compile time.

Oh, and you can compile your own kernel if you like - it's a really simple process. :)

Linux is kind of unusual as far as large software projects go (IMO.) It has very few build dependencies and the quality of the code is usually higher than average.

Linux surely ain't getting any slimmer. We're up to how many packet filters by now? Four? Five? How many X509 parsers are in the kernel?

well, at least you can choose from text or graphical user interfaces to browse and select the options needed to build a kernel!

I haven't compiled a kernel for over a decade, however back then it was

* make config

* make menuconfig

* make xconfig

Only one of those was of any use, the others were dumb.

Same here, only used menuconfig since both config and xconfig were unpractical. I'd be curious to read how many people still compile their kernel today for normal use (ie not for testing or kernel development). Back in the day I did because a new card often meant the driver (if any) was available as source only, while today nearly everything has been already built into modules and can be installed as such.

Even modules that aren't distributed with the kernel are compiled via dkms, which apparently came out in 2003.

It means when I install a new kernel (as a deb), proprietary drivers like the blackmagic decklink ones are automatically recompiled.

It's very different now than in 2000.

I compile my own ... for fun mostly. There are performance gains in selecting the correct CPU architecture for your machine. I have some old machines and it really makes a difference vs. distro stock kernels.

The modern procedure (for upgrading) is pretty straightforward:

make oldconfig; make; make modules_install; make install; reboot

Most of the removed stuff is unused architectures, those did not get compiled into your x86-64 kernel anyway.

Unfortunately, feature-cram and bloat seem to be the mostly inescapable reality of software, even in many open source projects where you don’t have someone from sales or marketing breathing down your neck for moar moar moar. It is nice when project maintainers can spend time on bug fixes, performance improvements, memory optimization, etc. Even better when a project can agree that they are “done” with features and all additional changes are maintenance.

I think it is one of open source's biggest failings that it succumbs to feature bloat at least as easily as proprietary software does, just for different reasons. The problem is that open source people generally work on what interests them, and simple solutions are boring.

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