Bloated Distros

[techieMoe]

I don't think a distro can be bloated. When I think of bloat I think of feature creep or things I can't remove from an application. Everything you don't want can be removed.

I understand the nature of this statement and mostly agree, but I have a nit to pick. If you're running something like, say, Ubuntu and you don't want Evolution Mail it can get pretty hairy removing it. The app itself removes with no fuss, but the various daemons and libraries associated with it can put you in dependency hell quick.

Removing some applications causes a cascade delete that basically hoses Gnome because for some reason they're marked as dependent on the entire Gnome infrastructure.

Same for removing individual games or accessories from Gnome; it simply can't be done and I see no reason why not. Why should I have to have GTali or Chess installed when all I want is Mahjongg?

In all fairness that's more a Gnome issue than Ubuntu, but it's still a pet peeve of mine. (Cue the "you should install this or that distro instead" crowd in 3....2....1...)

[reed9]

The linux kernel itself can be called bloated.
Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge' ? The Register

To an extent I agree with you bigtomrodney, but if the default apps are suffering feature creep, then it's fair to call the distro bloated, even though you can remove/replace those apps.

At the moment I'm facing with a trouble. I cannot open/save any documents in openOffice. It hangs immediately. I don't know why. It's also next to impossible to fetch packages from mirrors, although the network works correctly.

I used Mandriva 2008.1 for a few months back when it came out, and I sufferened similar problems with package management, and I also had a locale issue. I feel like I solved the latter, but I don't recall how. Or maybe that was when I ditched Mandriva...

[ongte]

Alot of the problems mentioned on this tread are documented on the Mandriva 2010 Errata.