Why does it need that much hard disk space?

[Cecil H. Whitley]

Hi,
First of all I need to declare my bias.  I selected redhat for my desktop.
Now, with that said I must also point out that I also use freebsd, solaris
(various versions) and even tried debian.  Why did I choose redhat?  Simple,
not very technical, I loaded it on servers at work because Dell supports it.
Since I have to work with it at work I might as well use it at home.

Redhat, and probably any distribution of linux can be cut down to a floppy.
You can't do that with windows.  In fact, NT/2000/xp take three/four disks
just to boot.  Linux also takes a lot less memory to run (and run well I
might add).  Redhat distributes several x-windows based front ends (Gnome,
KDE, windows maker, etc).  There is a lot of desktop dependant apps which
get loaded depending on which front-ends you choose to load.  The important
word there is choose.  You can load everything (an actual menu selection),
particular catagories, or individual packages.  I believe that this is the
same or similar in nearly all distro's.  The easiest way to trim the size of
any distribution is to not load x-windows.  That will drastically cut the
disk space requirements without removing any functionality you will need.

I guess the short answer is that yes, you can select for 3gb or more of
stuff to be loaded, but on windows you can get the same effect (with less
functionality) by loading the full operating system (not typical) and
netscape, m.s. office, Lotus smartsuite, Lotus Notes, your speech package,
Visual "c", Visual C++, CYGWIN, Photoshop, IIS, Exchange, SQL server, and
the list goes on and on.  The 5 CD's that make up the RedHat distribution
contains much much more than just an OS.  The same goes for Slackware,
Debian, and just about any other distribution of Linux (no offense to anyone
who's distribution didn't make it in my list, it's just my ignorance).

Regards,

Cecil