Linux

It's bloat if it slows me down and brings me zero benefit. I have a few extra packages on my system, but it's still snappy. That's not bloat to me.

When l go to upgrade my system and my skin crawls.

Seriously though, generally I justwantt only what I actually use. I recently reinstalled because I had a bunch if useless junk that was eating space for zero gain.

If it does things in an intransparent way.

I think it depends on the packages themselves. Do you have a lot of packages with overlapping functionality or are they packages that specifically focus on one function. I think its bloat when your file compression package also controls your rgb lights. Not all overlap is bad but too much is. Im a bit of a noob with linux though so grain of salt and all that

Bloat is when stuff you need pulls in tons of stuff it and even you doesnt even need. So that stuff gets updated, stored and even loaded to RAM.

Sometimes this is also a complex set of libraries, like GNOME and KDE have. There are tons of libraries, and especially when using Flatpak, you poorly always pull in all of them, as the runtime system is built like that. (Even though packagers could state the needed dependencies from that runtime, and then only those are downloaded)

Usually never, I'd consider something bloated if the battery life is down 10%-25% without starting programs manually.

I think there are several factors influencing when someone feel 'bloat'. There's the 'purists' that tend to optimize their system to be as 'lean & mean' as possible - relentlessly, and there's the simplists that just want a simple setup/dashbord they can control - without too many options/distractions from info-bloat. Info-bloat hints to different types of bloat: filesize, dependencies, gfx details/animations, option-bloat, monetization-bloat and so on. There may also be cultural tendencies within different distro communities gentoo, tendencies from those with the emacs syndrome, or other more political groupings..

The last factor I can imagine atmo is that the level of hardware is very important and low end operators will tend to see more bloat when things run slowly - no matter their 'bloat focus'.

I had some Pythoncode for you but couldnt get the codeblock to play along 🙃

Too many windows

I concider bloat to be either unneeded files/programs. So duplicated libraries, unused apps, not personal data files that are stagnant, anything similar to that. It's hard to put a metric on it, I just browse through my files every once and awhile and delete the unused stuff, but with the push for container based stuff I forsee that method will become increasingly harder as time goes on

I don't like when my PC/phone have a bunch of applications, so I try to delete all the ones I rarely use. Still some might find my devices bloated, but if I need/use them then I don't see an issue.

If it has the following: -graphical file manager -graphical app store -"start menu" of some sort -graphical centralized settings app I use i3wm on gentoo or arch

When there is bloated software eating more CPU and RAM than necessary.

If a simple text editor takes up 100MB RAM, then it's bloated, even if a 1GB game isn't.

Here's an aside: Unless there's a very good reason not to, we should all be designing software to run on 5%ile hardware (on a global scale) with reasonable performance. That text article should be loaded in under 5 seconds, not 30 seconds, on a quad core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 system. If you can ensure this, then it'll be blazing fast on modern hardware.