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
I don’t really care about “bloat” (whatever that means) I care about the system not being in chaos. I keep my bare system as clean as possible and install everything in a container, flatpak or VM.
I have been taking the flatpak route as well lately where applicable. Sure many people see flatpak as bloat, but very few things are installed as system apps and my $HOME stays cleaner. There’s also this gem https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671. I want as few things as possible to have rwx to my home dirs.