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Linux Too Bloated for $100 Laptop?
By: Aalaap Ghag   |   Apr 06, 2006

Venture capitalist and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the $100 laptop, thinks Linux is bloated and needs to slim down. He has “criticized the software industry, including those building Linux, for churning out bloatware that slows down even the fastest PCs.” He thinks Linux is not a viable option to choose when selecting an operating system for his $100 laptop to run on.

He did have a valid point when he said that software is getting more and more bloated day by day with unnecessary features and additions that makes the latest version run slow on the latest hardware. That I agree with, but when he goes to say that Linux is as bloated as Windows, I beg to differ. It's true that most popular distributions like Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSe and Debian are full of all the software packages that the users will probably never use, but that's not because of Linux itself - it's the distribution developers who add that bloat. The core Linux kernel, when compiled, doesn't go beyond a few MB in size. The $100 laptop will not run a full featured desktop version like Fedora, but a customised, trimmed and slimmed down version of Linux which will be perfect for a device of that caliber.

If Linux can be customized and made to work for cellphones and other portable devices, why would it not work for laptops, however underpowered they may be?

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Mahir @ Jun 21, 2009
There is always Puppy, DSL, or plain Gentoo. Linux doesn't become bloated, it just gives you the freedom of choice. You can remove whatever packages you don't need.
Stinkysocks @ Mar 09, 2008
when it comes to me i cane wait this is awsem
Dharti @ Feb 26, 2007
Hello,
Is there time to look at NetBSD? That is sure to run on this kind of laptop. NetBSD has low system requirements and solid performance as well. I last ran 3.0 on my Acer INNOVABOOK 360CD amd 100mhz cpu 8mb ram 2gb hd clean and simple. It is an X11 capable OS that can run most if not all your hardware and software out of the box. Good day.

Yemi Bedu
Yemi Bedu @ May 24, 2006
The bloat is in most cases *between* the kernel and the distribution: glibc and the dynamic linker. This behemoth just keeps growing and all of that is added "fat" in layers of indirection and code from all around all crammed into the C library. And no, it usually doesn't even get shared. There are somet lightweight alternatives (diet libc, uclibc) but they aren't likely to be a part of GNU/Linux distributions.

GCC is also going that route. One person probably can't understand it anymore and no-one will dare to make any significant changes beside addition. Stripping it down for any limited use is impossible.

Talk about the real monoliths (all heil)!
rr @ May 17, 2006
[...] Please be aware that MINIX 3 is not your grandfather's MINIX. MINIX 1 was written as an educational tool; it is still widely used in universities as such. Al Woodhull and I even wrote a textbook about it. MINIX 3 is that plus a start at building a highly reliable, self-healing, bloat-free operating system, possibly useful for projects like the $100 laptop to help kids in the third world and maybe embedded systems. MINIX 1 and MINIX 3 are related in the same way as Windows 3.1 and Windows XP are: same first name. Thus even if you used MINIX 1 when you were in college, try MINIX 3; you'll be surprised. It is a minimal but functional UNIX system with X, bash, pdksh, zsh, cc, gcc, perl, python, awk, emacs, vi, pine, ssh, ftp, the GNU tools and over 400 other programs. It is all based on a tiny microkernel and is available right now. [...]
Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, Part II @ May 13, 2006
if he is not willing to look at distros like ‘Damn Small Linux’ and he dosent want windows, then wat OS could he run?, i recon that ‘Damn Small Linux’ is the only choice he has unless he wants to make he owm!
Joshua J Lyon @ Apr 11, 2006
Linux Too Bloated for $100 Laptop? Moneycontrol Tech Blog, India - Apr 6, 2006... The $100 laptop will not run a full featured desktop version like Fedora, but a customised, trimmed and slimmed down version of Linux which will be perfect for ...
mypod @ Apr 09, 2006
This is a misleading news item; I was at Nicholas Negroponte's talk in Boston, so I can speak as an eyewitness. What Negroponte said was that TYPICAL Linux distributions are becoming just as bloated. Which is true enough. However, he still plans to use a Linux-based operating system for these laptops. Negroponte is very well aware that a Linux-based operating system (GNU/Linux, if you prefer) can be configured to be "less bloated" - and that is what his project is doing.
And this is essentially no risk, because there are ALREADY Linux distributions designed for smaller amounts of memory that work very well.
David A. Wheeler @ Apr 07, 2006
[...] LXer: Linux Too Bloated for $100 Laptop? Published at LXer: Venture capitalist and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the $100 laptop, thinks Linux is bloated and needs to slim down. He has “criticized the software industry, including those building Linux, for churning out bloatware that slows down even the fastest PCs.” He thinks Linux is not a viable option to choose when selecting an operating system for his $100 laptop to run on. Read More... [...]
LXer: Linux Too Bloated for $100 Laptop? - LinuxQuestions.org @ Apr 07, 2006
Focusing just on the vanilla kernel, the compressed (bzip) tarball has approximately doubled in size from 2.4.0 until 2.6.16. This is, I suspect, mainly due to an explosion in the number of device drivers and associated subsystems such as SCSI, PCMCIA etc.

For a specific hardware target most of these can be discarded. It would be interesting to learn the size of a kernel targeted specifically for a well defined '$100 laptop'. A carefully tailored root file system and a constrained set of user applications would complete the package.

This boils down to the '$100 laptop' distribution rather than downloading a more general distribution. It might indeed be derived from something like 'Damn Small Linux', but needs less hardware generality. It's essentially an embedded Linux and need not be bloated.

Richard
Richard @ Apr 07, 2006
It concerns me that Mr. Negroponte doesn't understand that Linux can be trimmed down to run from a floppy disk on a 486 with 12Mb. It sounds like he thinks that Linux is like Windows, a huge monolithic OS including GUI.
DSL or Puppy would maybe open his eyes.
I've run Linux on 266mhz, 64Mb laptops, so I know it'll run great on a 500mhz laptop with 512-1gb of ram.

Concerned,

Alex
Alex Chejlyk @ Apr 07, 2006
[...] If Linux can be customized and made to work for cellphones and other portable devices, why would it not work for laptops, however underpowered they may be? Permalink | | show comments » | « hide comments 2 Comments so far Leave a comment [...]
Moneycontrol Tech Blog > Linux Too Bloated for $100 Laptop? @ Apr 07, 2006
Who expected a $100 laptop to run a distro larger than those like DSL which only needs 16 MB of RAM and about a 100 MB of disk space?
Richard Holt @ Apr 07, 2006
Small linux distro like DSL would be fine.
Tony Sykes @ Apr 06, 2006
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