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.
Minimal option for Solus install?
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elfprince I think Solus is about 15% from that 55gb
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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.
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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?
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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.
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.
Yes virtual machines add it up pretty darn fast...but they're so cute and so useful...sigh.
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.