Yes. It is bloated. But not for the reasons you may think.
Live OSes need to fit multiple requirements compared to the installed ones. They need to:
- Install the OS without internet
- Provide a test ground for the OS
- Be a way to repair damaged OS
So of course it’s bloated, but in a good way. You may be already familiar with Ubuntu, and not care about the live OS part, so it would be bloat for you. You may not care about setting up disks, so GParted is bloat for you, etc…
If you want a less bloated installer, some other distros like debian give net installers
EndeavourOS iso also does the same thing but with half the size.
Half the tool chains
Live CD? More like live blu ray
Would fit on dual layer DVD.
CDs were 700MB
That’s not how you download ISOs… 😐…
👉 Qbittorent
Enjoy the faster downloads.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2aa4f5a7e209e54b32803d43670971c4c8caaa05&dn=ubuntu-24.04-desktop-amd64.iso&tr=https%3a%2f%2ftorrent.ubuntu.com%2fannounce&tr=https%3a%2f%2fipv6.torrent.ubuntu.com%2fannounce
The ISO shouldn’t be 7gb
Your Internet is flying… Oh my gosh… just noticed… I could only dream of seeing such speeds with my ISP…
anyways, even if it was a 500Mb ISO, using Qbit is much faster and you help others too…
Seriously what’s in there? Last ISO I’ve used with size like this came with 6 different DEs. Ubuntu ships only Gnome IIRC
Every driver you could possibly need for any hardware in the last 20 years? This is a live CD and is expected to just work no matter what you’re running it on.
Edit: Also, of course, every program you might need to usefully test-drive a distro, like office apps, media players, image viewers, browser, email client, and a myriad more. Now that I’ve said it I find 6GB remarkably small.
Fedoras iso is 2 gb
Fedora also by default includes only free stuff. AFAIK Ubuntu includes non free codecs for media and other software that doesn’t fit in FOSS category (it’s also one of t the reasons why Ububtu became so popular in my opinion, it just works works out of the box)
Fedora includes non free firmware as per there policy
doesn’t include nvidia drivers, doesn’t include codecs needed to play proprietary media.
Ubuntu ships only Gnome IIRC
Unity is it’s default.Ubuntu switched back to GNOME as default six years ago
Dunno how or why, but I forgot about that.
Probably the last time you dared try Ubuntu! 😜
What is truly bloated is their network-install images, starting with a 14MB kernel and 65MB initrd, which then proceeds to pull a 2.5GB image which they unpack into RAM to run the install.
This is especially egregious when running thin VMs for lots of things, since you now require them to have at least 4GB of RAM simply to be able to launch the installer at all.
Compare this to regular Debian, which uses an 8MB kernel and a 40MB initrd for the entire installer.
Or some larger like AlmaLinux, which has a 13MB kernel and a 98MB initrd, and which also pulls a 900MB image for the installer. (Which does mean a 2GB RAM minimum, but is still almost a third of the size of Ubuntu)Not to mention pulling a 2.5GB image is kind of hard on network. I don’t get it as that costs them more money.
We’re mirroring the images internally, not just because their mirrors suck and would almost double the total install time when using them, but also because they only host the images for the very latest patch version - and they’ve multiple times made major version changes which have broken the installer between patches in 22.04 alone.
If only there was some alternative distro without the bloat. Say, one link down from that one.
Alpine
Feckin gentoo
try dynebolic.org 1.5GB live OS including many pre installed applications like kdenlive, audacity, ardour and OBS…
<3 Debian network install image.
Or Linux Mint regular ISO. You know its bad when Linux mint has a comparatively small iso
Keep It Bloated, Snappy.
I hate you for this pun
You should install arch instead /j
Hopefully has some games bundled in
laughtrack.mp3
I bet a ton of it is Nvidia and AMD junk.
Linux shipping all drivers by default is a problem
Not really. Fedora is significantly smaller and it ships everything but Nvidia
Yes for sure drivers are not the cause of that problem. But its still basically an extreme violation of the unix philosophy
Debian net installer is 700mb, still fits on CD-R and with a DE selection and base tools during setup, it’s still about 2gb installed as a fully functional system requiring very little to get gaming. Seems fine to me. This post is an Ubuntu problem.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch02s05.en.html
There is always Gentoo stage1 /j
Is Ubuntu enshittifying?
You definitely haven’t seen Bazzite yet