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 :::
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God damn Arch users. /s
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where my openSUS at ?
Haha yeah, zypper is so damn slow. I thought about trying dnf in opensuse but didn’t want to risk breaking my install.
Good intentions but many of these tests are arbitrary and flawed.
Where’d you get that image? I made that 7 or 8 years ago. Has it been making the rounds? It’s weird to see it in the wild lol
Windows wouldn’t be too terrible if it wasn’t for all the pop ups all the time.
I need to work with it because I need to create a WPF app with Visual Studio, and when I switch from Windows to my personal computer, the difference is mind blowing.
Windows push you fucking add with a notification sound. It’s probably on me that I didn’t disable yet, but I don’t have to do that on any Linux distro.
- Edge Flatpak: unofficial, using zypak, same app on every Distro. Also launch times are damn irrelevant
- “storage used” is likely just the DEs filesystem abstraction
I was very very surprised about Ubuntu starting so fast. Afaik they preload Snaps now, which should increase that startup time.
