bloat?
an excerpt:
But most of all, you will see programs getting a Mozilla complex… Lots and lots of bloat, with no effort going into optimizing anything. KDE and GNOME have that problem. Even formerly lightweight programs like XFce are now heavy programs (thanks in no small part to the bloat of GTK2).
*sigh* ignoring for the moment the fact that gtk2 is actually much more cleanly implemented and less bloated than gtk 1.2 (what makes gtk2 slower in many cases is pango-xft or pixmap-heavy theme engines), just the perception that xfce is bloated makes me sad =(.
but i think that’s the natural course of things – no matter how much you want to write a barebones piece of software that is very light, there’s always the pressure to add more features as time goes on. deciding which features are necessary (or at least just useful) and which features actually constitue “bloat” is the problem, i suppose. but the fact remains that it’s very hard to look at a piece of software and say, “there. it’s done. i have no desire to add anything more to it. it does everything i want it to do – no more, no less – and there will never be a need for it to do anything more.”