Justin , in my case disk space is a factor. My NUC came with a 55G SSD, and already 70% is full. I am curious how much space would a 'bare' Solus install take, considering that I hardly added any extra software. I don't consider Solus a 'bloated' distro, compared to other 'light' ones I have used in the past. It feels very minimal as is. Shaving off a few Gigs would not make much difference IMHO.

      [deleted] My desktop sits idle about 18 hours a day and has 32GB RAM so, maybe? 😃

      elfprince Solus base install is very small to start with, the only thing that honestly takes up space is LibreOffice, it's huge. Take that out and that's about as minimal as you'd get.

          And, of course the browser, because no one needs more than lynx, right ? (I'm being sarcastic, just so you know)
          (Ok, now laughing) we could save space by just using wget and then a text editor to look at the results?
          Oh wait, a text editor might be overkill, we could just cat it and pipe to more.

          Firefox installed size 218MB.

          I did come back though to mention my install (a few days old) is <9GB.

          Libreoffice installed size (common package which is the bulk) is 672MB.

          Edit: /usr/lib64/libreoffice is 1GB according to ncdu.

          Edit2: Chrome + Spotify is 500MB also.

          Still 32G is used according to df -h . I removed what I could, but left LibreOffice and Free Office, plus Firefox and Chrome. Those are the heavyweights, I think. What else has so much weight?

            Well I expect you want it, but you could say the X-Window system has a very heavy footprint too. That'd be my guess for the next one. Followed by the windowing system (Budgie/Cinnmon/Plasma). I can't think of anything else that's awfully heavy, maybe the kernel and it's modules as a collection? But again, pretty strictly necessary.

              XerXes Agree every single word except I've always known this OS to have a vison, or ethos, so go with it. It's a no frills install.

                Personally i would like to have a "Alternative Downloads" section to get access to a minimal install iso, its a nice thing to have... i don't know if it's hard to maintain or something...

                Would be nice to an i3 user to have a feature like that. Would be nice to a KDE Plasma tester, just download a netinstall with the proper integrity check and install, instead of using testing isos without a integrity check.

                Also, besides we can consider this a "technical preciosity": less packages = less vulnerabilities to be explored.

                I really like Solus, it's an independent distro focused on the desktop... no companies getting in the way, no mix of interests... but i must confess that i feel like sometimes Solus overprotect the user... i feel like, if that decision of do not produce a netinstall iso is based on pragmatism, than it's fine, but if its based on protecting a certain philosophy, then it's an exaggeration.

                Obs: i also agree that for the average user an "out of the box" mindset is better, so, if a netinstall is hard to maintain, maybe the best decision is to extend this idea to future, when probably Solus will have more man work... i agree it's not an necessary thing.

                Obs2: I really hope that the new Solus package manager will solve this "orphan packages" problems in the proper way, without harming the average user.

                In the end, i think we should trust Solus leaders. They should know how much Solus can handle "non-essential" stuff, and how much that could hurt or take out the focus of the project or not. For now, for normal installations i keep my eyes on Solus, for minimal ones i keep my eyes on Void Linux or maybe Debian.

                  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2        55G  8.4G   44G  17% /

                  That includes my home directory. 8.4GB. I removed LibreOffice as I don't really use it but I agree with it being in the default install.

                  Any easy (and dangerous) way to remove the DE is to remove the toolkit it's built on. You'll have a pretty minimal install after that.

                  Justin , well right off the bat, I forgot about my VMs - that's 10G right there. Then some left over config dotfiles from several games I have uninstalled a while ago. No more mystery. Case closed, ha!

                    Yes virtual machines add it up pretty darn fast...but they're so cute and so useful...sigh.

                    elfprince I install Solus on 12Gb virtual machines to make tests without any space issues. The used space depends on what you do and nobody else than you can tell that.

                      [deleted] I mainly use web based options for office applications. I have Office 365 from my work and at home I use Google Docs a lot.

                        About a week late to this conversation but I also would love a minimum install version. I understand Solus aims to provide sane defaults and for users new to Linux that is great and there is a great selection. However for people who have been using Linux for over a decade, there are packages we already use (either for familiarity or preference) instead of some of these defaults and there are choices made that we would never make. Yes I can just remove these as always said in these discussions but personally I would rather build up than strip down. A minimal install would be for more advanced users who choose to use Solus instead of say Arch or Gentoo.

                        Anyway, I also understand that Solus does not have as much manpower and maybe if that grew this might change so I'm not suggesting it should be done immediately. But I did want to give further reasons for why this is requested and show there are a few users who would like this.