By Donnisk, 23/10/2026
Unlike times antiquated, we exponentially advance the art of computing towards higher performance, greater processors, better graphical performance for the sake of running fancy video games, social media platforms and bloated web browsers. Sadly, these things are in vain, and the work to advance computers vainglory, when we are so obsessed with hardware that we lose sight of software. Software is of great importance, computers would not be usable if software did not intermediate for the user, one would go mad trying to complete their daily tasks without having software to help them, and it is this very important relationship between the user as a sort of messenger, the software as the intermediary and the hardware as the processor that replies with output. The great people of computing before, in the times where the computation was purely speculative, a research initiative or for military use, computers were primitive input-output machines that did not allow one to watch a movie, listen to music, or even program (easily), punch cards were used in the earliest days to program. Thankfully, those great people developed and built many great technologies that enable us to access all methodologies for the inputting of information to our personal computers, and many great technologies that can represent the output in manners of forms auditory or visual. And while these things were solved, the computation was still a thing of great value, by the condition of the day, resources on the grandfather machines of what we call computers today, were extremely limited. One kilobyte of RAM was quite a generous amount. As of the end of the preceeding sentence, this document was four kilobytes in size. The modern world has changed a lot, and while many profess it is for the better, I have seen no reason as to how one logically comes to such a conclusion. I wish to ramble a bit on why software minimalism should be desired.
Firstly, would you use a medicinal product from a company that doesn't disclose the formulation process of the product? Probably not, I would hope, choosing to take it regardless is foolish. Would you run a program that does not allow you to know how it works? Most would not care, and use the software if it brings them a perceived benefit. Why would you be apprehensive towards the medication, but not the software? Whether it is debatable or not, having a vulnerability in your computer, or any kind of spyware on it, especially if you require storing personal information for whatever reason on the computer, can affect you in many ways in the physical world, just like the medicine, but most people cannot see this as anything past the abstraction of a computer just being the thing they use for scrolling some social media or playing some kind of video game. Especially with a social media platform, you run proprietary software, and that proprietary software is known to spy on you. If any unwanted or undesirable third party (a hacker, someone with a vendetta, etc) exploited that proprietary software to gain dangerous amounts of personal information on you, would you not cease to trust that software? Would you not change practise for self-defence? Wouldn't even this possibility scare you? For the overwhelming majority of people, they would not care. Proprietary software is easy to use, works on all your shitty operating systems and devices, why would I choose to not use it then? Why would I not use an alternative that is libre software? Because I do not stand for being exploited. For my safety, and for my personal philosophical views, I do not use proprietary software, as freedom comes with the extinction of proprietary software and its proprietors. A software should give you these freedoms: To be educated from examination of the source code, to freely modify the software to ones needs, distribute the software modified or unmodified in any way for any purpose and for the software to have no capability of malice against the users or the distributors. Many softwares that do many things fail at this simple task. When writing my "list of unethical software" I took these freedoms into consideration. Please view the list here so you can learn which softwares suck, exploit you or remove you of your freedom, and alternatives which preserve your freedom.
While the model of libre software is good by most measures, it is insufficient in two ways, which I will discuss and justify here.
While computers are in many multitudes more complex and powerful than they were twenty years ago, one thing remains the same. Resources. Computers require resources, like RAM and storage, VRAM for GPUs and other things. The modern computer comes with sixteen gigabytes of RAM, and one terabyte of storage, processors being packed with sixteen cores these days, one has a lot of resources at their disposal. While these computers are built to be abused by running Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS, one can install GNU/Linux (should they desire) or a BSD derivative to run more lightweight operating systems, it will function mostly the same. The benefit of lightweight systems is that you have the freedom to do more with the same hardware. Assuming one uses a standard Microsoft Windows 11 installation, you would be using around four gigabytes of RAM on idle, which already wipes quite a significant number away from you, it only gets worse with graphical programs that eat more storage and RAM, especially the zenith of shitty programs (that being chromium) you can only do so much at the same time. But should one desire to use a better operating system, you can open up to more things running at once. GNU/Linux distributions today use around one gigabyte of RAM and ten gigabytes of storage, which is substantially lower already, but should one use a BSD, let's say FreeBSD running dwm as their graphical environment, you can expect usage of two hundred and fourty five megabytes of RAM on idle, and around two gigabytes of disk usage on a standard installation, which is even better than GNU/Linux. If you care so much as I do for minimalism, you can use Hyperbola GNU/Linux-Libre, I have a very well optimized system that uses thirty two megabytes of RAM on idle, and I do not use a graphical environment at all. You should strive to go as minimalist as you can feasibly go, but you do not have to be as extreme as I am, at the point I am at, you lose a lot of functionality, like graphical applications are entirely avoided, one has to use userspace commands to manage files and one especially has to get used to text editors without graphics, or playing graphical video games, which is something I do not recommend doing in the first place.
I also want to discuss development of software. There is an understanding in "open source" and "free software" spheres that anyone and everyone can contribute. I fundamentally disagree with this. What justification does one have for letting any person do anything they want with your code, and "contributing" their code into the upstream project? I do not think this is a good environment for the preservation of a projects philosophy. I believe in absolute minimalism, and if the users demand a feature added, tell them to add it themselves! Say I write an operating system, and it is the worlds most minimalist operating system. It's a beautiful system written in assembly and C, it just works, it is maximally lightweight, and it preserves my freedoms, why would I change it? Because some people who hate my philosophy and want to ruin my operating system (for whatever reason) demand I rewrite it in Rust? Who cares? I'm not going to let some literal who's walk right over me as I stand for what I believe in and the beautiful piece of art I made. Is the highest order of rule not a king, descendant or founder of the kingdom? Why should the king bow down to a serf that has ideas on how to ruin the kingdom? With the community demanding that Rust be injected forcefully into the Linux kernel, and the GNU coreutils be replaced with uutils, those who oversee the Linux repository simply folded to the pressure because they did not stand on the principle of keeping the maintainability of the Linux kernel easy and simple. Instead they had to ruin the project they oversee just to satisfy people who do not deserve any say on the matters of the Linux kernel development and maintenance. This is why uutils/Linux is aiming (implicitly and without knowledge) to be the worst operating system, though I am afraid that Redox beat them to it. Good luck making your software shitty Linux people!
I believe it is fundamental to the usability of a computer operating system that everything is simple, minimalist, lightweight and efficient. People have lost the vision the developers of old had. Take the personal computer game DOOM as an example. The developers of DOOM did not make it so that you had to buy a Sun Microsystems mainframe to run it, they made it easy and accessible so people with average personal computers could play it, and the code had to be efficient, because back in those days, it was normal to only have sixteen megabytes of RAM and (very generous) ten gigabytes of disk space. When the game became open source, ports came to inferior machines like the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which was a sixteen-bit gaming console of the day. The game was well optimized to run on the extremely limited hardware, and it was a good option for those who did not have a personal computer at home to play DOOM on. Everything software related should be like that, because people do not use the latest supercomputers, they have ThinkPads like I do. Imagine running your shitty bloatware (maybe even spyware filled) game on my Core 2 Duo. Can't? That's because YOUR GAME SUCKS. Skill issue.
I should not have to spend a thousand dollars of my money just to play your shitty game or run your shitty software. Make your software better, make it suck less, or make it libre software if you are too stupid to optimize the code yourself. Anyone can play it then, even people like me. But why is it a benefit to those who already possess the ability to run your shitty unoptimized game? Because they can run Discord in the background or whatever normies do when they play video games. Using my highly optimized Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre setup, I can listen to music, program something, watch an anime or any other damn thing I desire, all at the same time, using the limited and old resources I have at my disposal. Isn't that crazy? I can write code, while listening to music. Revolutionary, quick, someone write a biography about this genius philosopher of our time, this Donnisk guy is a genius! Even if you have no concern for anything I have said, at least consider what I have written here, maybe you will see things my way. Maybe using minimalist software is a good thing, maybe it allows you to better utilize that limited resource called RAM. Whatever use-case you have for minimalist software, I seriously suggest you adhere to this philosophy to the best of your ability. But also be cautious, don't purity spiral too much, I personally still require the use of Microsoft Windows for school, and while I use a desktop computer provided by my college, I still (sadly) run proprietary shitware. Do your best to try and make things more efficient and better for you. I hope this has been informative or useful in some way to someone.