Size in loc of common software

Bloat is everywhere, in 2018 I started my journey on debloating my digital life, so far I mostly use linux as my main OS (the mostly is due to uni stuff I don’t want and/or have time to deal with), I don’t use a desktop environment, got rid of systemd, pulseaudio and polkit just to name a few. I could go on about how I debloated most of my computing life but that is not the goal of this article, that is I recently started to wonder: how much bloat is really there?

In order to answer that question I rolled up my sleeves and with the mighty power of post-its, git and scc I cloned the repositories of many common programs in order to check their bloat suckless style, with lines of code. Let’s get to the data.

UPDATE: I changed the method for counting lines of code, that is I changed utility from scc to cloc. The reason behind this is that cloc allows to exclude a list of languages from the code count, that way I can count only the lines that matter excluding stuff like documentation and so on. So entries marked with “x” mean that they were re-counted using the following command (that’s a big command):

$ cloc --exclude-lang='make,m4,YAML,SVG,CMake,DTD,Markdown,CSS,\
Meson,diff,Dockerfile,NAnt script,HTML,TeX,PO File,reStructuredText,\
vim script,AsciiDoc'

Init systems

Logging daemons

Technically systemd includes its own logging daemon but here is omitted.

Network

Generic network management programs.

Music players

Cron daemons

Text editors

Don’t tell me you saw that one coming.

Build systems

Shells (POSIX or not)

Boot loaders/managers

Display servers

Dependencies are counted two levels “deep” excluding duplicates, from the alpine linux x86_64 package repositories.
U: Not built, protocol code not generated B: Code generated

SSH servers/clients

Terminal multiplexers

Terminal emulators

Kernels

Permission managers

Compilers

Torrent clients

Web browsers

Does not include libraries, only the main repos.

Window managers

Audio systems

ALSA

Wayland compositors

Application launchers

Device managers

NOTE: mdev is only one source file, so loc count doesn’t include anything but that file.

Initramfs generators

Code counters

Package managers

Webservers

Syncronization and backup programs

Others

Stuff that doesn’t fit any other category (for now)