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Since 5+ years I haven't touched an optical medium anymore to install linux. Especially for debian, the largest ISO's are ~40 GB, mimicking dual layer blue ray discs. I doubt that anyone will burn this to a blue ray anymore... so why not just provide "full" image (at least as as jigdo template) with evertyhing in main (~130 GB for amd64).

12 hours ago

I guess not everybody wants to download ~130Gb -- not in one go. I know I don't: I'd rather download what I need to get a working system, then download the rest as time goes by.

Of course, the term "working system" is up for interpretation. Most distribution maintainers these days want to provide a full desktop environment -- perhaps more than one. But there's little mileage in making users download 100Gb of software that they might not use, just to get a basic installation.

I can't stand it being over a gig already.

Just updated with half a gig of 'firmware'. It's nuts.

I hope the current memory shortage knocks some sense into people.

I've been programming my whole life, and I don't think I've written more than a megabyte of compiled code. My biggest binary is still around a meg including the compiler and all sources. (except for maybe when I used SBCL Lisp... But nah, not even then)

Something is wrong here.

There are regions without or at least without speedy internet coverage, where these isos are often the only option to install packages. My solution now is always to cary two sticks - one of DL-BD1, with the installer, and a second one with the debian-mirror clone of the repository that I then add to the sources list. Of course, nobody want's to download 130 GB, but you don't have to if you don't need to ... for most users the "netinstall" disks are just enough....

@stack : I suspect that the issue of whether individual software binaries are bloated and efficient (they often are) is different from the issue of putting too many of them into a download bundle.

Of course, if individual packages were smaller, distribution downloads could be smaller. But the maintainers would likely just pack more of them in.

True.

As a sidenote there was a recent revelation that Windows 11 has a weather applet that uses more than a gigabyte of RAM, and cannot be easily removed

This is the kind of bullshit that makes me very mad, especially when this kind of thinking moves to Linux.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider that the recommended-by-Raspberry Pi foundation program that creates a thumb drive with a raspbian image is Balena Etcher.

It is currently 123MB zip file, almost half a gig expanded.

It does what a single-line dd command does:

dd if=image.iso of=/dev/...

It is Balena's flagship product, supporting a company of 50+ employees, no doubt aiming to go public.

We live in a crazy world.

balena etcher also has more than 600 bugs reported at github... hehehe...

@stack : "...the recommended-by-Raspberry Pi foundation program that creates a thumb drive with a raspbian image is Balena Etcher."

While I have many gripes with the Raspberry Pi folks, I have to admit Etcher is at least reasonably safe to use, if you're not sure what you're doing. Folks who do know what they're doing what need to follow the recommendation, and probably won't even read it.

i'm pretty the limitations is just a tradition.

I thought they had raspberry pi imager but the point is well taken. I've always used dd

@darkghost : "I thought they had raspberry pi imager..."

It looks to me as if they're recommending it again now. I think it was re-written last year.

Whatever they recommend, I can understand why they'd want to suggest a tools that works the same on various platforms, and won't trash the host system if you make a typo.

I guess this cross-platform thing is why the Pico SDK is based on cmake, and they won't document any other way of building software for it.

if i saw a linux iso that was more than 5gb i would ddos hte guys website

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