Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 7th Sep 2009 22:38 UTC, submitted by EvilWells
Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.
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Member since:
2006-12-20
No, you can't compress it losslessly. That's the whole point. So you can get things done quicker and to a higher quality, but at the cost of a bigger disk/dependency footprint and maybe a slightly slower runtime too (as long as it's fast enough for the user to be happy).
Writing good software is about understanding and satisfying the needs of the customer, and not bankrupting the customer in the process. If the customer doesn't need the software to run acceptably on a computer more than 5 years old, don't spend time and money focusing on providing that. Same goes for disk space. If you would focus on these things to the detriment of anything else, then you'll go out of business because competitors will undercut you by doing what the customer actually wants, instead of what your ego wants, and the competitor will probably do it cheaper to boot.
Even in Free Software land, the best projects focus on providing useful features and reliable software. The worst ones are perpetually crippled by the lead dev's bizarre obsession with some stupid minor facet of the software that nobody else cares about.