Bloated Software vs Lightweight Software

What is "bloated" or not is a matter of perspective.

But the question of "bloated" versus "non-bloated" has real-world consequences: a computer with 256MB of RAM may run very well with certain linux distributions and desktop environments. LXDE and Tiny Core Linux are examples. By contrast, GNOME or Windows 7 are not designed with low-memory systems in mind.

For proprietary software such as Windows, the code may not be modified by end users, which means that having a huge amount of code might not matter to the end user. For open source software such as GNOME, one of the barriers to modifying the software is the large amount of code involved. This matters, because making the software "open source" is significant only when users are capable of modifying it.