[defanor]

While I generally agree with the article, the "reality check" project seems somewhat forced: there are many widely used projects that are fairly lean. Many of the GNU projects are like that, not to mention explicitly minimalistic ones, and generally on a GNU/Linux system (either server or desktop) you have a few notable resource hogs, but the rest you would barely notice. Many of those can be built without Python build-time dependencies, too. And there are tens of thousands of proper packages in common distributions' repositories, so surely it is possible. The mentioned Electron, Node.js, and SaaS examples probably happen more often in certain other settings, perhaps enterprise software tends to be like that. Likely its advocates would bring up speed and cost of development, and it may be argued that even security is improved with those, given the other constraints. A more interesting "reality check" may be to take a few actual (and preferably somewhat widely used) bloated projects, and implement leaner alternatives, while fitting into the same constraints: similar profits for commercial projects, maybe similar initial expertise levels, time spent, and perceived impact for non-commercial ones.

[culebron21]

Linux distros nowadays runs several hundreds of processes, just after fresh install. That's nowhere near "lean".

[defanor]

That aspect could be leaner, indeed, although all those processes put together can easily consume fewer resources than a single bloated program or a web page, especially if they do not include a particularly large DE. The systems I have in mind as references are Debian with Xfce (runs on an old Atom-based netbook, taking 600 MB of main memory altogether), or Debian on a server with a bunch of common services (web, email with related services, XMPP, Gopher, IRC bouncer, authoritative and caching DNS servers, etc), also consuming under 600 MB (under 400 without DNS cache), with CPU load coming mostly from fail2ban, but being pretty close to zero. On the other hand, there are KDE and GNOME, which would probably at least double that resource usage.

To be clear, I brought up GNU/Linux distributions as examples of container-free packaging, and as notable collections of relatively lean programs, but not necessarily as an example of the combined systems being particularly lean themselves. Though then again, compared to something like recent Windows versions, perhaps even the Linux-based systems with larger DEs would seem lean.

[palata]

It really depends on the distro. But of course there is the same risk as ElectronJS: getting a huge Ubuntu distro that ships with everything is faster than building up from a lean distro.

Not better, just faster.

[guappa]

30 processes of 100kb each are still less than 1 process of 500mb