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Even on a bluray it would be impossible to stick everything people might possibly want.
Let's say I'm a gamer. For perfect OOB experience, I'd like my OS to come with the latest games and video drivers, so that I don't have to buy or download them separately. Should Windows include unactivated copies of Skyrim, Battlefield 3, or whatever else is trendy at the moment ? Should a new release of Windows come out each time a new game or Nvidia driver is out ? If I'm into photo editing, should Windows come with Photoshop ?
CD or DVD, there is always a line to draw. In my opinion, OSs should ship with what is necessary to manage hardware and run most software. Everything else is a nice extra, which is here to demonstrate the capabilities of the OS and satisfy needs shared by more than 90% of users, but must not go in the way of the main purpose.




Member since:
2005-07-06
I don't have experience with Ubuntu directly, but it's likely this is nothing to do with things getting bigger over time. It's never been possible to fit all the things on a CD-sized image that people actually want in a distro; this was a problem for Mandrake/Mandriva and MEPIS and SUSE back before Ubuntu even *existed*. Fitting a distro into 700MB has always been a trade-off, and distros have been considering moving to larger sized images for many years.
I can speak to Fedora from knowledge, and we've *decreased* the size of a live image with a given set of software in it over time, not increased it. But 700MB is still not really enough to fit in everything that everyone wants.