Hi Arthur,

Linux does have a wealth of products. It seem that whenever anyone in the open source family need a particular feature that does not already exit, they produce it themselves and then donate the fruits of their labors back to the community. Over time this has resulted in the volumn of applications available.

I like the idea of installing everything. Whenever I read an article about some special application or feature of Linux, I can be sure that it exists on my system if I want to try it out. There is no harm in having application that are not being used. Just make sure the unwanted services do not start up when the system is booted. Given the increased size of hard drives, coupled with their decreased costs, it seem little harm to hold on to some junk. Beside, the junk will never be need except when it is discarded at which time it will become necessary to reinstall it. Besides, most of the programs have common dependencies, so you usually wind up discarding the functionality of the junk, but don't really reduce the complexity of the system nor the space needed to house it. For example, you could discard the KDE desktop, but their are too many other application that depend on Qt, so you can't discard it nor it libraries.

If you decide to whittle down your install, I recommend using an rpm GUI manager, if you version of Linux has one. On RedHat it is, just a minute and let me check, /usr/bin/gnorpm.