Feature bloat is a term to describe the result of packing too many features and functionalities into a program. Usually, this term is reserved for program that have become overloaded with extra “bells and whistles” features and are no longer able to perform their core function due to these extra add-ons.
Are you tired of software with each new releases becoming perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version while offering marginal user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep.
There’s a school of thought that recommends a program does one thing but does it really well. There’s so many feature-laden programs where the vast majority of the functionality is used by a microscopic number of users.
Reco tries to be different. It’s an open source sound recorder that’s designed for elementary OS, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS.
Installation
We normally test software on Ubuntu, Manjaro and other popular distros, but we rarely use elementary OS.
Compiling the software on Manjaro works out-of-the-box. Clone the project’s GitHub repository and compile the program with the commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/ryonakano/reco.git
$ cd reco
$ meson build --prefix=/usr
$ cd build
$ ninja
Install Reco with:
$ ninja install
And start the program with
$ com.github.ryonakano.reco
There’s a convenient package in the Arch User Repository.
Installing Reco wasn’t plain sailing on Ubuntu 20.04 as we ran into a problem with one of Reco’s dependencies. It needs granite >=5.4.0, but our default installation only has version 5.3.0. Granite is an extension of GTK+ that provides, among other things, complex widgets and convenience functions designed for use in apps built for elementary OS.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary