What software do you avoid, and why?

[NeddySeagoon]

pa4wdh,

I need to retest then. My MFP M479fdw seems to work. Fol printing anyway.
I never got it to scan with SANE, so I scan to USB stick or to its web server.
I've never tried the fax :)
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[wjb]

[Tony0945]

[mv]

In order of necessity of avoidance:

1. polkit. (Security reasons)
2. udisks. (Security reasons; hard dependency on polkit)
3. pulseaudio (though I am forced to the protocol by discord-bin; using pipewire as a bearable substitute) and related:
4. alsa-plugin[pulseaudio]: Why on hell should I put a perfectly working alsa tool into pulseaudio which eventually sends to alsa after some delay - if I am lucky. (Unfortunately, I have to maintain my own pipewire ebuild to get rid of this unsane dependency).
5. avahi (security reasons)
6. nss-mdns (security reasons)
7. acl, attr because some root programs do something to your filesystem without your knowlege. Unfortunately, this is practically unavoidable, and I have myself written some root scripts using it, since for wayland there does not seem to be another way.
8. pam (security reasons). Unfortunately, I found no way to avoid it with wayland, but I have the useflag only enabled where unavoidable
9. gconf, gnome-vfs. Unnecessary bloat, storing things in your ~ which you do not want to have stored.
10. liblastfm (spy service)
11. mariadb, mysql, postgresql (this has nothing lost on a desktop unless you really use a database for business reasons or happen to develop for it)
12. corefonts (license reasons). package.provided is your friend
13. two different icon themes or any fonts beyond those needed for texlive - unnecessary bloat

Note that systemd is not on the list, since I like to have it as an alternative init-system. Without polkit it is probably not so catastrophic, security-wise, although I would not use it on a regular basis for security reasons. Of course, I do not use its dhcp-and-other-net-badly-rebuilt-because-NIH.

[dbtx]

My list is much like some of yours. Lately, I don't want >=pango-1.44, because I've long been very satisfied with a particular combination of settings that I first found back in 2004-2005. Now it's cancelled, perhaps temporarily, perhaps not. Pango has funny ideas of the meaning of "maintenance mode" and Harfbuzz may or may not be inclined to compensate. I'm still thinking about what I could and should do about it.

[Comrade_Stalin]

Oh you know, the usual bloat. Full Desktop environments, systemd, gnome apps, electron, anything that takes more than twn minites to compile on my 12 thread CPU.

Also, this is my first post on the forum. Greetings, Comrades.
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I agree with the official state-sponsered narrative and are therefor entirely neutral and unbiased.

[figueroa]

[Zucca]

[kukibl]

I'm not sure I avoid much ...

Whole Systemd drama passed me by, because I was off Linux at the time it appeared and most of major distros switched to it. I use OpenRC exclusively because I know it well enough (better than systemd in any case).

I do not use binary packages in general, where the choice between source-based and binary one exists. The only exception is Gentoo's dist kernel, which I primary used as fallback at the beginning (and for debugging purposes), but became too lazy (or simply and completely out of spare time) to maintain my own kernel in the meantime.

I do avoid Chromium(s) and WebKit(s), except Vivaldi which is my fallback browser. The same applies to Electron and JavaScript/Node software in general.

All the other usual bloat I do use. Either I do not have or know the reasons why should I avoid it or even if I did - I'm not sure if I would be willing to invest my time in finding the ways to avoid it.

However, I do keep my world file minimal and carefully pick all the USE flags, globally and locally.

[eccerr0r]

I only try to avoid binary packages but even those... if it has to be used, it has to be used.

That being said, I still use libreoffice-bin because it doesn't seem to play nicely with dependencies...
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[the_actuary]

GNOME. Having tried to use it for a few months and desperately tried to like it, I've realized it's an abomination ... the very thing from which evil gets its shape and form. The stupid thing is not decently customizable, crashes, breaks extensions that try to customize it with every release and wrecks havoc all over the place. I've used XFCE, Cinnamon & KDE and have nice things to say about them. GNOME, I have nothing but absolute hatred. It's beyond me how major distros use this as the default DE or maybe that's why Linux is hated so much in the lay user space.

[GFCCAE6xF]

[dmpogo]

I do not particular avoid any packages, but I do try to keep my system tidy. Which means avoiding duplication if possible. Namely, being with KDE, I try to avoid anything gnome related, using openrc - anything systemd-ish, etc.
I disklike, to the point of try to avoid, packages that require with them customary build systems (such as rust).

The one thing I really would like to disappear is polkit.


But I find that among applications (as opposite to the system) that I use everyday, more and more are binaries - zoom, skypeforlinux, vivaldi, firefox-bin. Perhaps surprisingly, libreoffice I still compile.
And the difference being, many of them are on fast rolling release schedule, with updates appearing almost weekly. With their compilation requirements on not so new machines, it becomes impractical.
Libreoffice, though, gets updated rarely enough