[flatiron]

what are you trying to measure?

openbsd will definitely feel from 10000 feet more "bloated" because its simply not as performant as linux. that's not a bad thing, it purposely does things the "right" way for security purposes and doesn't take any shortcuts.

alpine is a lot smaller than openbsd but it really was created for an entirely different purpose. i always take alpine as "a muscl distro that makes a good docker container, oh and it runs on bare metal too, i guess". i've never seen alpine on metal in prod and i've been around the block a whole bunch. ive seen it in a metric ton of docker containers though.

a chatty dmesg also isn't really bloat as well. although dmesg is a bit of a mess (and only recently default restricted to privileged accounts at least on arch).

[foxfluff]

I don't consider poor performance to be bloat (though poor performance can be a symptom of excess bloat). Bloat is more about obesity, and it shows in disk usage (upgrades take forever? yeah two gigabytes of data across 2000 packages; kernel doesn't fit in flash? keep unticking those kbuild options..), excessive memory usage, ridiculously long man pages, etcetra. Bloat doesn't necessarily impact performance in normal use, e.g. those 2000 packages I got on Fedora mostly sit on my disk untouched. But it's still there and it shows when it's time to update (and sometimes while doing other stuff).

OpenBSD might not scale well to a large number of cores, and the program running on a 8-bit microcontroller (with 512 bytes of ram) on my breadboard isn't fast, but neither are particularly obese.

I don't think the purpose between Alpine and OpenBSD are that far apart. Alpine aims to be a simple, small, and secure general purpose OS. OpenBSD is very similar, even if Theo has been pushing the "research OS" angle. There's obviously a big difference in how much software include in the base install.