SliTaz Forum

new_u

Member

Registered: 2014-03-30

Posts: 93

Distro size

Slitaz provides a fully functional OS including a 'desktop' in ~40 megs. Why is that other 'ordinary' distros need 1 or 2 gb to basically do the same thing?

I realize that Slitaz doesn't have a full set of libraries, so depending on what you want to run, you need to get more stuff, but still the size of those additional libs is hardly 1 gb.

I've been installing a fair amount of packages, and looking at /var/cache/tazpkg/4.0/packages I see that I only have some ~250 megs in additional stuff.

Are other distros bloated? Why?

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Distro size

Other distros depend a lot on other stuff that it has running like systemd (or Upstart in Ubuntu) to handle start ups (we use traditional init), synaptic to organise packages while the system is idle (we don't need it), heavier sound managers like PulseAudio (we use Alsa). They also tend to run the full GNU Coretools (we use Busybox and a handful of them instead) for the commands and Bash instead of the Ash provide by Busybox. Most distros also come with a large part of the codecs and apps like Chrome and VLC preinstalled - not to mention all the programming languages like Python (sometimes up to 3 version of it), Perl, TCL/TK, JAVA and MONO. Also don't forget OpenOffice. All that adds up and you end up a big iso.

SliTaz tends to take a more minimalistic few - we'd rather you decide what to add to your system than us doing it for you and while we did have to make a few compromises and install udisk and gvfs to make pcmanfm work properly, but we still run lighter than most.

frash23

Member

Registered: 2013-04-19

Posts: 35

Re: Distro size

I also think dependencies have a big part in this - lots of high-end have large libraries as dependencies which depend on more dependencies, which quickly adds up a few hundred megs.