size of distros

[vindicadi198]

i am quite curious as why some distros like ubutu have a installation iso of size 700 mb while other distros like fedora,mandriva and opensuse have a installation iso of more than 2 gb where as all these distros have similar functions and made for the same purpose.

[daark.child]

Mandriva, Fedora and openSUSE also have isos of 700 megs just like Ubuntu. The default Ubuntu installation is a little bare in terms of apps and you have to use apt-get/aptitude to install anything else you need. Other distros have multiple cd or dvd editions that contain quite a lot of packages and installation routines that let you pick and choose what to install right from the start. This makes it easy for people who want to customise the install and those that have no or slow internet connections because they don't have to spend time looking for packages on the net.

[Runn3r.cze]

it depends on how many packages is on the installation cd. many distros provide both, cd and dvd isos. both are useable, but with dvd you willl get more apps immediately after installation

[Agent-X]

The apps are to show you what kinds of programs you can have on Linux. Of course, it's to give an example of what Linux can do in terms of programs. In terms of hardware, it's about the kernel and the modules. And the size, unless it's from back in the day, it's really reliant on hardware capability: I think that would be the hotplug vs. udev situation.

In short, I've always considered the Fedora install to be way over the top.