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by cesarb 825 days ago
> Considering we are talking about Megabytes in the age of Terabytes HDDs,

Most distributions still use a "Live CD" format, actually a "Live DVD" nowadays (with a few hacks to make it also work as a USB pen drive image), for their installers, and that limits the installation image size (which also includes enough packages for an offline install of a desktop environment) to a bit more than 4GB (they fit into a common 8GB USB pen drive). So it being the "age of Terabyte HDDs" does not matter, for packages expected to be installed on a normal desktop system.
2 comments
walteweiss 825 days ago
Does it make sense though?

Any USB drive is so super cheap these days, you can easily get something like 128 Gb for $15. Even if you live in an area where it’s not as easy (e.g. not very developed places), you’re likely to find, say, 32 Gb for less than $10. So I don’t know, maybe someone needs that 4 or 8 Gb limitation, but I believe it’s a non-issue in most cases.

Also, on top of that, we do have a very speedy Internet I’m so many places. Which means if you’re limited here, you can go with the net-installer. If you’re limited on both, more likely it’s a very niche case and you can have a spare large disk to download everything offline.

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prmoustache 825 days ago
Do we have to waste just for the sake of wasting?
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walteweiss 825 days ago
Do you mean time and energy for optimising things that make no sense, so you have no time and energy to optimise things that make sense?
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immibis 824 days ago
Not optimising things that "make no sense" is how we ended up with operating systems needing gigabytes of RAM just to boot, and AAA video games taking over 100GB each. A reasonably efficient system is the sum of reasonably efficient parts, or else you end up in UniformlySlowCode hell.
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destructionator 824 days ago
> So it being the "age of Terabyte HDDs" does not matter, for packages expected to be installed on a normal desktop system.

But neither does the "size on disk" because the ACTUAL size on disk might be reduced by gzip/bzip2/xz/zstd/whatever is invented later. Even if the program using the package doesn't support compression, it supports filesystems and filesystems often support some kind of transparent compression. It isn't a hard problem to solve.

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