Why I can't recommend Arch or Gentoo

Kyle kyle4jesus at gmail.com
Wed Sep 23 11:00:43 EDT 2015


The first thing that caused Arch Linux to grow significantly was the
migration from two single-architecture images, one for x86 and the
other for x86_64, to a single dual-architecture image that can boot on
any of the two machine types. This happened I believe in 2012, and
caused the CD to grow from a bit over 200MB to well over 450MB.
TalkingArch, because of the brltty package, grew even more, as many
dependencies are added even with the minimal package we have. Chris was
still working on TalkingArch at that time. By the time Kelly and I took
over the project, the size had grown to nearly 550MB, and has now
topped 700MB. This is largely due to upgrades in the base packages,
which usually add just a little size over time as code complexity
increases. However, the small size increases double on Arch, because
every time one package grows, it actually grows twice on the same iso,
once for i686 and again for x86_64. TalkingArch, like Arch Linux
itself, stores two of nearly everything, due to the dual-architecture
format, which is why even 1MB of growth in a single package is nearly
2MB on the iso. TalkingArch was simply the first to break the 700MB
size limitation of a CD, because it has more packages. Hope this helps
explain things.
Sent from my isobox


More information about the Speakup mailing list