User:Ta180m/Reducing bloat

If there's one thing that hardcore Linux users are ridiculously obsessed about, it's the vague and scary concept of *bloat*. You gotta keep package counts low, use WMs, and compile stuff. What exactly is bloat? Wikipedia offers a few definitions, such as code bloat and software bloat, but we aren't going to worry to much about it. The important thing to remember is that bloat is bloated and must be disposed of.

Keeping package counts low

Use pacman -S package --asdeps when installing a package that you don't plan on keeping, so that the next time you clean up orphans, the package will be automatically removed in case you forget to do it manually.

You can use pacman -Qe | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1 pactree -cr to see which packages can have their Pacman#Installation_reason/installation reason changed to "as dependency". Note that this command depends on pacman-contrib, which you can install with the method above. This will reduce the number of explicitly installed packages on your system.

Instead of installing base, you can install only the packages that you need. Be careful about breaking your system if you do this.

You can find which of your packages have the most dependencies using pacman -Qe | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I {} -n1 bash -c "echo -n {}' '; pactree -c {} | wc -l" | sort -k2 -n. That should give you a good idea on what's most effective to uninstall to reduce your package count.

Don't use a DE

See WM for a list of window managers you can use instead. Or even better, you can give up having a WM altogether and run your graphical apps from a TTY with xinit application $* -- :1.

Another alternative is to use the window manager from an existing DE. For example, to run KWin standalone, use

$ export $(dbus-launch)
$ export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
$ kwin_wayland konsole --xwayland

Try not to install software outside of pacman

Never run any other package manager (pip, npm, gem, etc) as root. Always make install to local directories unless you do not have any other options. Prefer the AUR to snap or flatpak, but make sure you always read the PKGBUILD.