Ha! I remember those days with Windows98. I literally had the CD on my HDD so I could reinstall it faster ^^
On convergence: Well, if you don’t want LibreOffice on your phone to connect it to a screen, just remove it.
Other than that: It’s not the amount of things that’s installed that makes stuff slow (that is amount of poor background daemons) or unstable (that is amount of poorely written, running apps).