Linux is only bloated if you choose to have the bloat. It works fine without Wine/WineX, KDE, Gnome etc...
Some Linux distributions are very small.
I think the term bloat is overused and relative. I remember lots of people regarded MUI as unnecessary bloat - mainly because they were trying to run it on their stock A1200s and found it slowed things down considerably. On my Amithlon setup (Berniethlon, I suppose) I can't even tell the difference in performance between MUI apps and non-MUI ones, and the small amount of extra memory used is insignificant.
I also run Gnome on my Linux setup on the same machine, and to be honest, the term bloat never crosses my mind.
