The whole linux stack got bigger though - just look at what you need now to compile stuff, cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth. gtk2 was great; GTK is now a GNOMEy-toolkit only, controlled by one main corporation. Systemd increased the bloat factor too - and also gathers age data of users now (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954).

I guess one of the few smaller things would be wayland, but this has so few features that you have to wonder why it is even used.

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curt15 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>The whole linux stack got bigger though - just look at what you need now to compile stuff, cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth

Those are all development tools. Has the runtime overhead grown proportionally, and what accounts for the extra weight?

	▲	array_key_first 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Runtime-wise we use more garbage collected languages now. Java and such are great and can be very high performance, the real cost though is memory. GC languages need much more memory for book keeping, but they also need much more memory to be performant. Realistically, a Java app needs 10x the amount of memory as a similar C++ application to get good performance. That's because GC languages only perform well when most of their heap is unused. As a side-note, that's how GC languages can perform so well in benchmarks. If you run benchmarks that generate huge amounts of garbage or consistently run the heap at 90%+ usage, that's when you'll see that orders of magnitude slowdown. Oh also containers, lots more containerized applications on modern Linux desktops.

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goalieca 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve been using cmake since early 2000s when i was hacking on the vtk/itk toolkit. Compiling a c++ program hasn’t gotten any better/worse. FWIW, I always used the curses interface for it.

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ScislaC 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is the option of legal compliance a bad thing? They have corporate customers.

If there's no opt-out, that's a different story.

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GrayShade 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It's plain FUD. systemd always had fields for the full name, email address and location. They were optional, just like the date of birth. Bad systemd!

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anthk 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Is not FUD; the full name, email and the rest were not META/corporations mandated, which are lobbying for it so they can earn money with users' preferences. Get your spyware to somewhere else.

If META's business model is not lucrative, is not my problem.

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gruez 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>which are lobbying for it so they can earn money with users' preferences

Given it's a field where you can put absolutely anything in (and probably randomize, if you want), how is this different than the situation today, where random sites ask you for your birthday (also unverified)? Moreover Meta already has your birthday. It's already mandated for account creation, so claims of "so they can earn money with users' preferences" don't make any sense.

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anthk 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Keep gaslighting:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification...

Good luck when most libre users toss RH/Debian because of this and embrace GNU.

	▲	gruez 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Keep gaslighting: This is against HN guidelines: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." >The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges. So... most users?