Let me get this out of the way up front. I absolutely love Fedora to death.
It’s my favorite distribution of linux by far, and I’ve played with a lot of different distros. I love the way way it works, I love how it’s on the bleeding edge, I love how things are laid out and they just make sense. I love the massive repository of almost every piece of software I want to run right at my fingertips. I love being able to type
# yum install package
and it just works. Absolutely fantastic. I’ve been a user since Fedora Core 3, and the team just pushed out version 11. Good job, guys.
But there’s one thing nagging me about the distro. I almost never notice it, but I’ve been running a lot fresh installs of Fedora lately, so it’s become pretty obvious to me. If she asks me if she looks fat in her Leonidas dress, I’m going to be honest and say yes.
Now let’s give it a fair shake here, it is, after all, a distro designed for desktop use. It’s aimed to be usable to folks who might be trying linux for the first time, and it’s stellar for that. But that comes at an expense to us power users on occasion.
About half the time or more I use it as a GUI-less server, so I’ll be the first to admit I’m probably using the wrong tool for the job, but I just can’t give it up. She makes a great server distro too…
Except for the fat.
I just did a fresh install of Fedora 11, and I challenged myself to configure it with the absolutely minimal set of packages I needed. No desktops, no windowing system, no crazy text-based packages either. I unchecked all the unnecessary WiFi drivers (all of them, I don’t have wireless on this machine) and really slimmed it down to the bare, bare essentials.
Or so I thought… it still installed a whopping 600 packages and takes up almost 2 gigs worth of space. I realize 2 gigs might seem like a small number, but I’m provisioning an old box that uses a 20 GB hard drive. I’d like to see a ~500 MB install rather than have it take up 10% of the disk for the OS alone.
As the package installs were flying by, I tried to get a glimpse of what on earth was taking up so much space. One package that caught my attention was the Leonidas wallpaper pack. Really Fedora? I didn’t even install a desktop or windowing system and you’re installing wallpapers? What am I going to use those for?
My guess is that they’re just standard packages included with every installation, but that doesn’t make much since if it offers me the ability to install without a desktop or X Windows. Perhaps some more intelligent package sorting is in order.
Thankfully I’m not the only one that’s noticed.
One of the planned features for Fedora 11 was a new Minimal Platform, which would install the bare minimum package set to get up and running, allowing you to bring up exactly what you needed with yum. When I originally read about it, I was ecstatic.
But alas, after realizing how much package culling it would require, dispute over where the option should appear in Anaconda (the graphical installer), and a general feeling that it wasn’t critical, it was pushed to Fedora 12.
Crap.
I guess I’ll stick with her… for now. Maybe I’ll hit the gym and see if she gets the hint. It’s just not good for your health Fedora, you’ve gotta drop some of that heft.
Have you tried Arch Linux before? I use it as my primary OS and I love it. It sounds right up your alley, too.
It’s very minimal by default. And I really mean minimal. The ISO is about 200mb, and only the bare essentials are installed.
It has a great package manager called pacman. If there isn’t a package for the software you want, you can easily make your own package from source, and use the package manager to install it. And, there is the Arch User Repository where you can post your package build and download other builds from other users. You can vote on packages and the best ones are eventually moved to an official repository.
Arch follows a rolling release model, so a simple “sudo pacman -Syu” refreshes the package lists and upgrades all available packages.
It also has a great forum, wiki, and IRC channel. Since the learning curve for Arch is relatively steep, it’s a pretty sophisticated community.
It’s worth a shot, at least.