>So, if the ability to fit onto less that 2GB is important to you, and if
>SuSE makes it hard to do so, than I'd suggest Debian as an obvious
>choice. (I imagine that RedHat fits likewise, but I am not familiar with
>it.)
To be fair to SuSE (and RH etc), you only get the lot if you ask for it.
A minimal installation requires about 200 MB. You'd be hard pressed to
fit it in less if you want X and all that stuff. It's a sign of the
times, this software size creep, I'm not talking about single floppy
routers here. One nice thing about SuSE compared to RH is that you
don't have to decide right at the beginning how much you want, you can
install the minimum and then add packages. I'm sure that's trivial in
Debian too.
>I suspect that the compelling reasons to use SuSE are all of the other
>(not open-source) items that they bundle with it. This may explain the
>bloat. If you can live without these, then Debian is ideal.
One reason some people want to have a fairly complete distro on CD is
that not everybody wants to do a large scale update of packages via the
Internet in case the disk gets trashed. If I started from the previous
Debian distro 2.1 (yes, I know 2.2 is out), and my disk got trashed, I'd
have to DL dozens of packages to catch up to the present. With a recent
commercial distro, I'm 95% of the way to my current setup. Nothing
wrong with either model, they're just different models that's all.
There's no reason either that some enterprising person couldn't provide
stable snapshots of Debian at regular intervals for people who want the
comfort of a CD set.
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