[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.