Some software bloat is OK

Tangent, but software bloat always leaves me wondering what hardware/software could be if we had different engineering goals.

If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?

We know that software bloat wastes RAM and CPU, but we can't know what alternatives we could have if he hadn't spent our metaphorical budget on bloat already.

Screens and radios do a lot to limit battery life on most modern devices even if the energy use running the OS and user software was free.

If with a reasonable battery standby mode can only last a few weeks and active use is at best a few days then you might as well add a fairly beefy CPU and with a beefy CPU OS optimizations only go so far. This is why eInk devices can end up with such a noticeably longer lifespan, they now have a reason to put in a weak CPU and do some optimization because the possibility of a long lifespan is a huge potential selling point.

"If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?"

Volunteer-supported UNIX-like OS, e.g., NetBSD, represents the closest to this ideal for me

I am able to use an "old" operating system with new hardware. No forced "upgrades" or remotely-installed "updates". I decide when I want to upgrade software. No new software is pre-installed

This allows me to observe and enjoy the speed gains from upgrading hardware in a way I cannot with a corporate operating system. The later will usurp new hardware resources in large part for its own commercial purposes. It has business goals that may conflict with the non-commercial interests of the computer owner

It would be nice if software did not always grow in size. It happens to even the simplest of programs. Look at the growth of NetBSD's init over time for example

Why not shrink programs instead of growing them

Programmers who remove code may be the "heros", as McIlroy once suggested ("The hero is the negative coder")