Are Linux distros become more bloated? I truly don’t have the research to add to this. I have seen, in my own experience that distros that are the most user friendly, the most Desktop oriented, are more bloated because they install all of the most useful, most used applications used by the general desktop user. This is a good thing. These “desktop” Linux distros, make it easy for a user to transition to the Linux OS.

In a recent post over at me.isnick.net, CA, a contributing author and full time slacker here at slackstuff, wrote about the space usage of his Slackware installation taking up 4 to 6 Gigs of HDD space. This was with him choosing the “Full Install” option. This amount is still not comparable to the 10G install of Windows. Slackware Linux is one of the many distros that give you multiple options on install right down to choosing each individual package. These kinds off options in a Linux installation can greatly decrease the size of your installation. These options are also reserved for a more experienced Linux user.

Consider the Ubuntu’s of the *nix world. They are what I call a “puke it” distro. During an install, it pukes everything from the disc onto your hard drive. But, as I said about the general user. They just want their computer to work.

So, while the size of the Linux distro installations may be growing. They are also improving. And as CA mentioned in his post, the applications are growing in size. I say likely because they are growing in functionality. HDDs get larger and cheaper so, disk space today isn’t really an issue today.

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