Fedora 34 Change To Further Compress Install Media Rejected Due To Install Time Concerns

[Duff~]

I think Fedora does not need to compress the install media for it to get smaller. It just need to get rid of all the bloat apps. Seriously, it's as bad as Android phones nowadays. Why does the desktop have to come filled with apps I don't need when there's an App Store right there!? The first thing I do right after installing Fedora Workstation is to remove every app and then install the Flatpaks of whatever I actually need. Even Firefox goes, as Mozilla themselves now maintain the package on Flathub, and I would rather get my browser straight from it's developers.

I mostly use the netinstall because of that.

[jo-erlend]

fact is, Fedora Devs dont care that people or there users have limited download bandwidth, so they'll make the DVD bigger again with more bloat .

Long ago, I was in that situation. I had a very slow line at home and I wanted to play with different aspects of Ubuntu. I solved that problem by bringing an external disk to work, boot Ubuntu and run apt-mirror to download the whole thing overnight. If you have friends who also have limited lines, just meet up and clone the disk. I still do that, but these days, the disk also works as an installer for all the major spins and sits on my keyring. That wasn't very possible back in 2006.

[arQon]

This right here tells you everything you need to know about why Fedora sucks.

It does, but not for the reasons you offered. How about we do the math on this...
6.5% slower for an install that takes, what, 20 minutes, is 21.3 minutes. What a huge impact THAT'S gonna have!

Meanwhile, 142MB off a typical DVD-size installer, around 700MB, actually IS a huge improvement. On most connections in the under-developed world, like the USA, the additional download time alone is easily far more than the exrta 80 seconds the installer takes.

So yeah, based on those numbers it's a stupid decision. Even for the case where you DL the ISO once and install a ton of machines from it, that +80s is still not really even worth caring about. Either my starting premises are wrong or this is just braindead.

[uxmkt]

That's so cool!!! So I can download an entire repository, write it to a thumb drive and have it all ignored by the installer

For a rolling distro: perhaps. But then again, if there is a network outage, at least you have _something_. It need not even be a network outage. A few years back, some distros used to not have WLAN drivers in the install media, but some newfangled laptops were starting to ship without LAN ports.
For classic releases: you know as well as I that the update channel seldomly carries an update for each and every package, though, this I give you, the smaller the distro as a whole (something that offers like 100 packages instead of Debian's 80000) is much sooner to reach that.
It's all a trade-off. And the distros have decided that what they currently have works for their general audience (which you probably aren't).

[Jabberwocky]

I wonder if Fedora managers considered: https://github.com/richgel999/lzham_codec

[NotMine999]

Fedora-Server-netinst-x86_64-32-1.6.iso : 709,885,952 bytes.

That size is obscene.

The last Debian NetInst image that I downloaded was roughly 1/2 the size of that Fedora image.

[NotMine999]

Long ago, I was in that situation. I had a very slow line at home and I wanted to play with different aspects of Ubuntu. I solved that problem by bringing an external disk to work, boot Ubuntu and run apt-mirror to download the whole thing overnight. If you have friends who also have limited lines, just meet up and clone the disk. I still do that, but these days, the disk also works as an installer for all the major spins and sits on my keyring. That wasn't very possible back in 2006.

Your solution is inspired and creative.

[MadeUpName]

fact is, Fedora Devs dont care that people or there users have limited download bandwidth, so they'll make the DVD bigger again with more bloat .

There is a version of Fedora and I am sure most distros that includes a kernel initrd the bare network stack and the installer. All of the packages are then expected to be pulled from the repo that means the install media is trivial and thee is no need to immediately patch after a fresh install. People can't complain about having no network and having to patch over the internet right after installing at the same time.

[alcalde]

That's so cool!!! So I can download an entire repository, write it to a thumb drive and have it all ignored by the installer because every package has a .0.0.1 update to go and download it again anyway? Man computers are so convenient these days.

I'm actually just happy if the Distro v(N-1) installer is smart enough to notice that Distro vN is available. I keep my install media in a box in a drawer, please don't make me update it every time I need to use it...

No. Let's take OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's awesome, despite what was done to destroy OpenSUSE Leap. IF you have network access during install and you CHOOSE to do so, it can check the online repositories and install the most current versions of packages during the install process. The benefit for this is that you get dropped into the most secure, bug-free OS possible after first boot. I remember one study about Windows XP that found that the time it took to patch stock XP to SP2 had become greater than the average time it took for a stock XP box connected to the Internet to be hacked. :-( I also remember Sabayon once being released with a bug that it impossible to log into the KDE desktop. You had to run something as root from the command line to fix the problem, which was rather hard to learn about if you couldn't log into your desktop to get to your browser and check the Sabayon website to learn this information. Me, I'd rather have the safest and most bug-free install as soon as possible. I don't know of any distro that releases pointless updates to all of its packages as you suggest.

OpenSUSE also has an option to check for and download updates to its installer, which also protects against buggy installers. I don't know of any serious bugs ever happening, but if there were a bug that chewed up hard drives I wouldn't want to innocently pull out a 3yo installation disk and begin a new install unaware that I'm about to lose a partition.....

[alcalde]

I think Fedora does not need to compress the install media for it to get smaller. It just need to get rid of all the bloat apps. Seriously, it's as bad as Android phones nowadays. Why does the desktop have to come filled with apps I don't need when there's an App Store right there!? The first thing I do right after installing Fedora Workstation is to remove every app and then install the Flatpaks of whatever I actually need. Even Firefox goes, as Mozilla themselves now maintain the package on Flathub, and I would rather get my browser straight from it's developers.

It seems what you should be outraged about is why aren't you in control of what shows up on your desktop? On OpenSUSE, there are a number of install profiles from barebones server through to full desktop, including a minimal desktop option. After you select that profile, you can customize the install before it begins, which includes being able to select or remove every single package (if you have network access, you can install from the full selection in the main repository and not just from what's on the install medium). So in my case I tend to select minimal desktop, then add the KDE pattern, tweak the KDE apps listed, then select other patterns for office software, multimedia, etc., remove some other apps, and I can even set vim to "taboo" (never install) because I really don't like it and never want it on my system. :-)

As for your flatpak obsession, I don't see what this really brings except software that isn't tested to work on your system and less free disk space.