A system us bloated when I feel it is bloated. It is highly subjective and there is no real line to cross. It is just more of a sliding scale, at one end there is no code on your system that you never use and at the other there is nothing on it that you ever want to use.

The former can likely on be reached on small microcontrollers where you have written everything exactly how you want it, and you would never even consider using the latter.

Realistically every system has things younever use, even the kernel has modules you will never load. And every non tiny program has features you never use. All of that is technically bloat but each instance I don't think makes your system or even an application feel bloated.

So really the question is when does the bloat bother you or get in your way. If you are trying to install an OS on a tiny embedded device where space is a premiumthenn you are going to draw that line at a different point to on the latest desktop with multi terabytes of storages and oodles of ram.

Anyone that claims there system has no bloat is technically lying to themselves. But if it makes them happy who cares? If your system has every package installed and it does not bother you at all thenitt does not matter at all.

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.

maybe if it has too many things I don't want.

But I find the concept a bit silly. A large number of installed things doesn't usually matter if they're not running. I had over 5k packages in my previous kubuntu that I was running for some 3y and it was just fine. The time and effort I'd spend cleaning it up and installing things as needed wouldn't translate into any perceived benefit imo.

I'm now running endeavour with a third of this number of packages, since it's a fresh install and not ubuntu. But other than some storage space and missing packages if I try to build something, I can't say there's much of a difference. As for storage, packages rank low in usage, for my desktop anyway.

Bloat is relative to the user. If I have a piece of software installed that I don't use, it is bloat. If a program has features that I don't use (especially if they get in the way) they are bloat. Random config and cached files from programs long gone are bloat. It is not really about saving CPU/RAM/disk resources. It's like keeping my room clean. I also consider any UI element that is not strictly necessary bloat, because it gets in the way, takes up screen space and doesn't look clean. I have 485 packages on my 3+ year old Artix system right now (and some things I compile). Sometimes it can be higher if I use some extra software. But more than 700 hundred packages will start to feel uneasy. An example of bloat: I used startx to start my X server (like almost everyone else). Then I replaced it with a small shell script (sx). It worked exactly the same for me, I couldn't notice the difference. That means that everything startx provides over sx is bloat in my case: completely useless. You can see it as a form of minimalism.

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)

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.

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

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

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 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.

When over 10% of my system resources are taken up by background processes that I don't want. For disk space bloat I don't worry.

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

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