Am 18. Nov, 2000 schwäzte Brian Cluff so:

> > a full Mandrake 7.2 is 2.6Gb? Are you kidding? That would have to make it
> > the undisputed king of open source bloatware. Wow - and some of you rag on
> > RH.
> 
> A big linux instalation isn't the definition of bloatware.  They would have
> to be putting 200meg word processors on the system to qualify for that.

Yup. Number of packages isn't bloatware. I wish RH would come with 2.2 GB
of installable stuff. Maybe they'd remember some of the important packages
:). I'm led to believe that might've been fixed with 7.0, but I'll wait
until 7.1 to test it. Do they have more than one MTA yet? sendmail, yuck
:).

> It's just that they included a lot of extra software that most of the other
> distros aren't including yet, and to me thats very much appreciated.
> 
> Besides, i think that Suse would have to be the undisputed king of the
> lasrge distros... what are they up to now, something like 8 cd's or one DVD?

I think SuSE's even larger than debian, which has somewhere between 3k and
6k packages :). Minimum debian install is about 40MB, though :). SuSE
couldn't do that with $10 Mil in seed money ;-).

The minimal functional install footprint is somewhat important, depending
on the application. Definitely important for firewalls. I also count it as
important for servers. For a desktop? Depends. If they're install Gnome or
KDE they're advertising they have RAM, diskspace and CPU cycles to spare,
so give 'em what you got :).

Ah KDE enabled Enlightenment, now *that's* bloatware ;-).[1]

> I never did like installing Suse, just because it was information overload
> when picking stuff to install.  Extra is good, but haveing every program in
> the word available on install is kinda ridicules. I would be a bigger fan of
> just having them be post install extras.

I didn't find it bad, but the last time I installed SuSE they *only* had 6
CDs ;-).

I've definitely become a big fan of post-install package management and
network updates.

ciao,

der.hans

[1] Note: I run them both, albeit not yet together.

-- 
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