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There were several posts about bloated software, possibly triggered by a new release of Lagrange by skyjake.
Ainent has an opinion on this:
I'm a fan of the Unix philosophy, which is essentially:
A program should do one thing, and one thing only, and do it well. Utilize multiple small programs that complement each other to solve more complex problems.
gemini://ainent.xyz/gemlog/2022-05-07-critique-of-lagrange.gmi
Skyjake has responded, thoughtfully imho:
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-05_bloat.gmi
While I am a big fan of "make one program do one thing well" and "make every program a filter", there are limits to this philosophy. There are limits to everything, with the possible exception of your imagination or the sky or famously our beloved human stupidity.
Not everyone is working on the shell all day long. This is a choice everyone can make, but it is by no means compelling. I do use the i3/sway window managers, so I'm clearly working in a GUI envionment. However, a tiling window manager full of terminal/bash frames is indistinguishable from the pure console for many people.
Full disclosure: I am using emacs, since 1993. One can argue that this is a bloated program. For me it definitely does more than one thing: editing text (plain, latex, source code, etc.) including revision control (magit), reading and editing email (mu4e), organizing todos, appointments, calendar, contacts (org-mode), reading and editing gemini/gopher space (elpher) and occasionally some of the BIG web (eww).
But I tend to share the view, that emacs is a different beast: it is a Lisp machine, which I use as my main interface to interact with my computer. And in this view emacs does one thing well. Whether or not emacs is a smol programm, I have commented on elsewhere:
/en/2022/20220309-smol-or-not.gmi
There used to be yet another web browser called uzbl, which worked like a filter iirc. The code is still available, but the project seems to be abandoned:
There are a lot of things computy, which fit my personal taste of bloat: KDE and Gnome, the default installation of Ubuntu or Debian, even systemd (after having seen alpinelinux using openRC) and the linux kernel having acquired a virtual machine of sorts (eBPF) and a different technology is in the works (Rust support).
But then, there is no "one size fits it all".