I often hear folks in the Linux community discussing their preference for Arch (and Linux in general) because they can install only the packages they want or need - no bloat.
I’ve come across users with a couple of hundred packages installed (likely fresh installs), but I’ve also seen others with thousands.
Personally, I’m currently at 1.7k packages on my desktop and 1.3k on my laptop (both running EndeavourOS). There might be a few packages I could remove, but I don’t feel like my system is bloated.
I guess it’s subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?
I’m asking as a relatively new Linux user - been daily driving for about 7/8 months
To me bloat is anything using resources when I didn’t ask it to. Someday I’ll have more than 16 gigs of ram to throw around, maybe then I won’t be such a memory miser. One of the biggest things that pushed me into linux was the myriad of live service-esque background processes windows was forcing on me.
If I was a little less dyslexic I’d have a CLI for everything, now THAT’S efficiency!