--one driver per chipset (vs one per branded add-in-board)

--smaller without crapware

--just empirically true:

tv@tv:~$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda5 28G 11G 17G 39% /

this is my bloated as fuck ubuntu media machine. could be much smaller if it mattered, but that's pretty small already, no?

anyone remember damn small linux? I used to have that on a 128MB (yes MB) flash drive found in a desk at work. but bytes are cheap...

I'm old enough to have played the embedded engineer using floppyfw on a spare 486 board screwed on a piece of wood along with a 1.44 fdd and a power supply cannibalized from somewhere. That was my embedded development system nearly 20 years back:) A bit later I ditched the floppy in favor of a spanking new 4 or 8 MB (megs, not gigs) flash parallel ATA "diskonmodule". Just checked, I'm surprised that the floppyfw page is still there. https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/

Speaking of small distros, I gave a try at both DietPI and TinyCoreLinux on virtual machines and was amazed at how good they perform.

Bundled doesn't mean statically linked, it would be plain dumb if not impossible to add every driver out there into the kernel image; nowadays about everything is dynamically loaded so it doesn't impact the kernel size and doesn't waste memory or CPU cycles unless loaded, which happens only when necessary (eg when a USB device is inserted).