Though the kernel itself might sit at ~60 MB (depending on compile-time options), and you might need to addd another 120MB for the firmware.

Of course, this can be stripped down a lot if you decide to taylor the kernel to your system (less drivers, etc).

To answer GP, a full texlive installation takes around 2GB on my system. That's mostly fonts, but also packages, tools and documentation. I take the bloat for convenience, because I can afford a few extra GBs nowadays. If you want to go for minimalism, you still can (and even reach smaller footprints than back then), but that's no longer the mainstream option. Not when a GB is a few cents.

Does Guix use the Linux kernel or Hurd? In any case, I can understand kernel growth. There are a lot of new drivers, new and old architectures (386 machines were supported in Linux until a few years back; and there's still a fork that does), all the new file systems, all the new networking and cgroup isolation. You can build a minimal kernel without a lot of that stuff, and it will still run on older embedded hardware. But just having a large kernel source and large default kernels/initrds isn't bloat so much as supporting a lot of hardware possibilities.

From here: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/guix.html#GNU-Distribution

> Our goal is to provide a practical 100% free software distribution of Linux-based and other variants of GNU, with a focus on the promotion and tight integration of GNU components, and an emphasis on programs and tools that help users exert that freedom.

Not trying to sound snarky here: does _anything_ use Hurd?

Well, there's that (former?) Debian project, an Arch variant as well, and I think there is a GUIX variant as well[1]. But they still share the same limitations: 32 bits, no USB, etc.

Hurd itself has interesting concepts, like translators. And it might be useful in some specific cases where robustness is needed. But you might as well try MINIX 3.

Hurd is on my list of things to try, just like Plan 9.

[1] (edit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd#GNU_distributions_run...

It's "supported" by some people, but it's not ready for prime time, and never will be.

I can't help but laugh at the irony that one of the most popular and most proprietary operating systems in the world uses a forked Mach kernel called XNU, for "X's Not Unix."

Anyone at Apple have a beef with the FSF back when they named that?

> Of course, this can be stripped down a lot if you decide to tailor the kernel to your system (less drivers, etc).

Is there not a tool that does this for you automatically? That'd be kind of neat! Like a webservice that takes your lspsci/lsusb output, then gives you a compiled kernel just for you back?

the kernel itself is able to do it with `make localmodconfig`. you'll need a rebuild if you buy a new usb toy though...

There's a significant difference between bootstrap binaries and the actual distro binaries and this thread seems to be conflating the two. Out of curiosity, does anyone know how big Alpine's set of bootstrap binaries are? This article estimated Debian's to be ~550MB. It would be interesting to know which distro has the least amount of stuff taken for granted.

Unless you enable module loading then you can probably just build the module.