[sweden]

This post is kind of dramatic. Windows is much more than a simple kernel: it is a collection of drivers, tools, a desktop envinroment, a network stack, user base applications (like Paint), etc, etc.

If you compare it to the entire Ubuntu project, you will se a project of similar dimensions.

[laumars]

I don't know about Ubuntu specifically but some distro's do ship sources with their installation media and it usually fits on 1 DVD.

When I say "sources" I am talking about kernel, user land and desktop applications too.

However that would be compressed tarballs and doesn't include git history - the latter being where I suspect most of the disk space is being used in that screen shot.

[megous]

You're off by a magnitude.

https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/9.7.0/sour...

Source code compresses quite well, so uncompressed, this may be somewhere between 200-250 GiB.

[laumars]

My benchmark was SuSE, which was 1 DVD's worth. However your post now has me wondering if that didn't contain the complete sources either - just sources for server components. That said, those 12 DVDs likely cover way more than the Windows sources would. eg multiple different image editors, LibreOffice (would Windows sources include the sources for MS Office as well?) several different databases (MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc). So even that might not be a fair comparison either?

Unfortunately without access to that source directory all of this is all just going to be speculation anyway.

I did also make the point about compression too by the way :)

[megous]

Right. Probably it's not at the level of full debian archive, but those 500GB probably include all kinds of weird services and windows tools and programs most users never run or have a use for.

[laumars]

Oh I'd guarantee it would. And the vast majority of those libraries will exist for backwards compatibility too. Much like with the CLI user land on Linux (GNU coreutils et al).

I think the real proof of the pudding is the footprint of a default desktop in Windows vs Ubuntu+. There was a time when Windows would literally consume one order of magnitude more disk space than Linux after a fresh install however I think things have since converged in the middle somewhat.

Going back on topic though, that looked a dev directory for Windows so would likely have contained a .git directory too. That would easily balloon the disk space used by any (mature) project's source.

+ I know you were talking about Debian, but I'm going with Ubuntu now because it's more of a desktop orientated distro and frankly it works better in Windows favour anyway due to it installing more software by default than Debian would.

[agumonkey]

fair point about compressed bytes, but what about structure ? even ubuntu never felt that intimidating but maybe it's because I just didn't count folders

[LeoPanthera]

A better example would be one of the BSDs, where the kernel and userland are all developed together in a single source tree.

[laumars]

Why would that be a better example? BSDs don't write all their own desktop software. Ok, they will be some edge cases before you jump in with "OpenBSD wrote cwm". Generally speaking, there will still be a lot of other 3rd party software too such as GIMP. So BSD isn't going to be any different to Linux in that regard.

However this is all moot because the point I was making was about the centralised source repositories; those will contain not just the sources of the base Linux / BSD system (kernel + user land) but also any other source that are offered as binary packages as well (ie all the stuff that's part of the platforms build system)

[esjeon]

A big difference there is that BSD covers only the core platform, while Windows covers everything from head to toe.