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I wonder how much of that comes from careless programming (accidental complexity), and how much is essential complexity in keeping with user expectations for p

I wonder how much of that comes from careless programming (accidental complexity), and how much is essential complexity in keeping with user expectations for polish & responsiveness (driven by Apple, etc). Another possible source of the problem I can imagine might be the ubiquity programming style of using high-level languages and important libraries on a whim. If the language does not strip out unused code paths in dependencies, sizes can quickly add up with the same libraries being reimported multiple times.

citrin_ru 4y ago
When not much resources available one have to be more careful (about not accidentally creating O(N^2) where O(N) would work and not wasting RAM on multiples copies of the same data) and at same time one have to refuse adding non essential features with bad HW resources / user value ratio. In corporate software it is often easy to find some low hanging fruits allowing to reduce CPU/RAM usage by 10x (but incentives stacked against doing this). In open source software like KDE/Gnome I think it would be hard to find blatantly inefficient code and the main reason is the overall complexity which is hard to reduce without sacrificing some features.