Even though different Linux distros are often fairly close in terms of real-life performance and all of them have a clear advantage over Windows in many use cases, we can’t reject the fact that Arch Linux has undoubtedly won the competition. And now I’m so glad to have another reason to proudly say “I use Arch btw”
::: It was a joke of course :::
Jesus
Installation size:
Fedora - 7.7 GB
Arch (actually EndeavourOS) - 45 GB
Ubuntu - 49.2 GB
Windows - 72 GB
How the hell is Fedora so small? That’s insane.
He just look at how much empty space the file explorer showed… I don’t know how good of an indication that it is. The OS may choose to conserve a decent amount of space for things like swap, hibernation file etc.
Also, preinstalled apps.
I mean, I think it’s fair to lump that all together as space taken by the system, no?
It’s not like you can use that space for storing files
I don’t think we know how performance and stability behave when the disk gets full. You can’t really use that space if it would cause your system to crash because it can’t create a hibernate file for instance. It also will vary by system configuration a lot (you need way less swap with 8Gb of swap than 64gb of ram) which makes the comparison only valid for the creators specific configuration.
What are these sizes from? All my Linux installs start with <20G root disks and end up with some spare.
And Windows at 72G? Whilst it’s more than Linux it’s not that much.
I think the videomaker may be failing to account for swap space. The latest Fedora releases use zram (swap that lives in memory instead of hard disk) by default, while the rest do not. Windows in particular does not take 72G and tends to be aggressive in swap allocation. The fact that he presents this data as “free space available” adds confusions while seemingly burying the simplest answer.
“Swap space that lives in RAM” No… just … no. Swap is for when RAM runs out/low. It literally cannot live in RAM…
Are you familiar with ZRAM ? I do not understand your certainty that I am incorrect.
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Zram is swap in ram. It uses fast compression to quickly compress memory instead of moving it to disk.
The disagreement here might be a semantic one. When people say “swap” they’re usually referring to the swap partition on disk, not just any memory that can be used to “spill” to.
What you are describing with zram serves a fundamentally different function from swap space. If the OS dumps its memory to swap, the PC can lose power and still recover. If it compresses LRU memory to zram, and loses power, it cannot recover.
Both are useful in low memory situations, but swap covers more than that. Most familiar with swap space would agree that its location on a nonvolatile disk rather than in volatile memory is critical to what makes it “swap” space.
“Some of the use cases include /tmp storage, use as swap disks, various caches under /var and maybe many more. :)”
https://docs.kernel.org/6.1/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html
How the hell is arch so large? My laptop is only 27GB and that includes all user data and several years of crap being installed as well as several docker images. A fresh install should rival that fedora install.
Yea I don’t understand either
I’ve recently installed arch in a VM and it didn’t take more than 8GB. That’s with firefox and vscode installed
7GB is a reasonable size for a Linux install with a GUI and some software. The rest are excessively large. I’ve never gone over 30GB of disk usage in my root partition, even with a large number of programs installed.
It seems quite likely that, in the Arch ( EOS ) system at least, a tonne of that space is being used up by the package cache. By default, the system keeps copies of the packages for all software you install. This can indeed take gigs of space but it has nothing to do with your running system. A simple command purges them all and reclaims the space. You would obviously want to do this before reporting installation size. I bet he did not.
Arch package spliting is not as hard as Debian/Fedora.
But IMO, it’s because Fedora uses BTRFS with compression enabled.
Oh, so his numbers are just garbage then. You can install regular Windows 10 on a 16gb drive with no modifications. (You can’t fit anything else, and there’s not really even enough space for updates, but it’s possible.)
I regularly install it on 30gb VMs and still have space left over for whatever apps it needs.
If Windows 10 immediately destroys itself while trying to do its first update, you didn’t actually fit it in 16gb. It hasn’t fit inside of 32GB for several years now.
Ya, I am not going to trust anything coming out of a post that cites that numbers for install size. As others have said, even the Windows one is bonkers.
As an EOS user myself, I love the conclusion but have no faith at all in the methodology.
If you want an article to make Linux look good, a test of the new Damn Small Linux would be interesting. It fits a basic version of practically every program you need into a 700 MB system. It also includes the APT package manager and full access to the Debian 12 stable repos so you can easily add anything you want on top of that.
It would be interesting to know what footprint it would require to run the “tests” he runs here.
My guess will be hibernation file and swap. If any of those had suspend to disk enabled, the hibernation file will be the same size as installed Ram… which can take up a good percentage of that used space. I have a pretty bloated xUbuntu install on my system right now and it’s sitting at 10.6GB. Including swap and /home, but no hibernation file.
Hibernation I’ve found handy on my laptop, but I wish there was like a fastboot option with Ubuntu. I know windows 11 does it to boot faster.
Because it runs everything stock