Not a many years back one could easily include an office suite and usual round of apps in 600 MB. What's up with the bloat?

Knoppix in 2004: http://media.lug-marl.de/doc/fsub-edu-knoppix/KNOPPIX/index_...

It had room for "Edutainment", "Emulators", "Toys" and "Development": http://img33.photobucket.com/albums/v98/prodmaster/TONS_OF_A...

Exactly what I was thinking. Did Ubuntu stop shipping their OS's on 700 meg CDs? When did that happen?

A couple of years ago.

If that is true, the message on this page is hilarious:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/

I quote: "Warning: This image is oversized (which is a bug) and will not fit onto a standard 703MiB CD. However, you may still test it using a DVD, a USB drive, or a virtual machine."

I guess it's not a high-priority bug then :)

Tangentially, there are still netinstall (mini.iso) and Lubuntu Alternate images (which allow to install a basic command-line system and go from there) with a text-based installer which DO fit on a CD.

I am intrigued too - what's taking up all the space? Hires desktop images or something?

It would be interesting to see an analysis of the space and how it is used.

I wouldn't be too surprised if the increase in scripting language usage and maybe even better debugging support were partially at fault here.

That seems reasonable. If more default apps depend on a full python/ruby install to operate, that would certainly have an impact on the overall size of the image. Also, mono is used in many desktop apps now.

My (total) guess would just be lots of packages, and the packages themselves have grown larger.

This made me wonder how Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux are doing these days:

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Starte...

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

support for wider range of hardware? backwards compatibility? the former has certainly improved a lot over the last couple of years

>> Is this related to Snappy, Ubuntu Core, or Convergence?

> Nope, sorry for the confusion in the name!

this answer is missing a troll face emoticon

That's excellent, the first thing I have to do with new machines is always strip out the distros favorite tools and install the ones I use.

Yeah! I don't want to use one of the super-customizable distros (which force me to have to worry about things like drivers and fonts), but I still like to do a bit of customization. A solid base like this sounds pretty cool.

If the first thing you're doing is removing packages then you might want to consider a different distro. Arch is a brilliant choice for people who want minimal footprint high performance installations.

Arch goes too far the other way. For example, it doesn't support my wireless card(s) out of the box.

There's nothing particularly power user about preferring to use VLC over Parole, when I install new windows machines I remove windows media player and install VLC.

My ideal os comes with: A desktop All the drivers I need A tool to get extra software (Internet explorer will do for windows, a terminal + apt-get/yum/pacman/pkgng for nixes)

If I wanted to start at a command line and build my way up, I'd definitely pick FreeBSD. Really what I want though is just the desktop. Anything that sets file preferences will probably get uninstalled.

This seems like the perfect desktop for i3.

Edit: i3 window manager: https://i3wm.org/

Assuming you mean Intel i3 CPUs - these are more than fast enough for plain vanilla Ubuntu (not that there aren't other reasons to want a minimal system).

Even (new) celeron/sempron are probably plenty fast for Ubuntu.

Pretty sure he is refering to i3, the tiling window manager software.

Ah ok! Never heard of it.

Yeah the window manager.

I only want a tiling window manager, a couple of browsers, Sublime Text 3, and access to the internet.

My personal opinion is that i3 rocks, and and that I don't need all of Ubuntu or Xubuntu. I don't even need Rhythmbox or Thunar. Just give me the bare bones of a modern Linux upon which I can install i3 and add just the few things I need.

You would be better off using an Alternate Lubuntu CD or netinstall (mini.iso) Both have a text-based installer with the option to 'Install a command line system', then go from there.

I'm figuring how to install an awesome WM with MATE, lately. https://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Quickly_Setting_up_Awesome... http://askubuntu.com/questions/616520/how-do-i-set-up-awesom...

Well, that just means that an regular (x/k)ubuntu isn't necessarily the distro you're looking for. Back in the days when I was using Linux on my main computer, canonical shipped a stripped down version of ubuntu (ubuntu server maybe ?) where you could install just what you need and nothing else (I beleive it came without a window manager for instance).

What you're describing was pretty much my Archlinux setup btw. It was just more convinient for me to build it from an archlinux than a regular ubuntu. You could with an ubuntu though, it'd just be a lot more work I feel like.

EDIT: turns out I'm pretty much explaining you what you already know.... I'll leave my comment up anyway, maybe it'll help someone else.

> My personal opinion is that i3 rocks, and and that I don't need all of Ubuntu or Xubuntu

Getting there with Ubuntu was pretty much "apt-get install" when I made the switch to i3wm. Sure, you end up carrying along hundreds of MB of "junk", but I just didn't find it worth the hassle to trim it down - I have far more junk than that in form of data of my own I could delete...

Any recommendations/guides for how to get i3 running in Xubuntu Core using VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro?

I probably followed the instructions on that page for using the i3 repos, but it's been long enough that I can't remember doing it or how I did it. But I am using their repos. I don't notice anything explicitly different or better, but i3 isn't one of those things where you're waiting for a new gizmo with anticipation; it just puts up your windows and shuts up about it.

I'm on LinuxMint.

Just did this myself. The i3 docs didn't cover the topic.

sudo apt-get install i3; xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /sessions/Failsafe/Client0_Command -t string -s "i3wm" -t string -s "--replace" -a # logout, login

The problem was then that the Alt key wasn't being recognized, possibly due to VirtualBox.

All window-managers are pretty straight forward under linux. Read the documentation.

Or any window manager that isn't part of the Gnome/KDE environment, for that matter. Personally, I love the idea of a trimmed down distro that allows you to install whatever packages you want on your own. Package managers make that easy, and I hate the bloat on most standard desktop distros.

The X in Xubuntu has a dedicated meaning.

Supposedly XFCE plays quite nicely with other window managers replacing xfwm.

Very much so that I'm trying them both right now.

I tried this last week, but I canceled the install because the mini.iso didn't have NIC drivers for what I was installing it on. I decided to use the official Xubuntu image instead. (I didn't see/remember the community core images.) My hope is the proper images will have the same driver set as the official ones.

The netinst allows you to download the packages you manually select during the install. Wouldn't this allow you to install a minimal system with only the packages/apps you want? So this ~600MB "core" option is really for people with unreliable internet connections, or otherwise don't want to install via TCP/IP, right? Or, am I missing something?

Great for a slimmer virtual machine.

FYI, this is not available for Trusty Tahr (14.04). I only skimmed to find the link to mini.iso and didn't notice the article omitted references to 14.04. My mistake, but sharing here in hopes of saving someone else some time.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD:

Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin"

I love this for a development VM! I wanted this for a long time: an ubuntu-based linux that doesn't have the non-development application. Thank you for creating this!

What's the meaning of a caret here?

It's not a real package name, it's a tasksel task.

Quick explanation: http://askubuntu.com/q/211912

Differences between apt-get and taskel: http://askubuntu.com/a/257172

This used to be done by metapackages (a .deb containing no files but having dependencies on everything in...GNOME, for instance). Why this new thing?

Wonderful.

I already switched to Xfce on Mint/Ubuntu.

Should try it out in crouton.

Somebody needs to disrupt the Ubuntu deployment.