I just downloaded 23.10 and its 4.8GB. I went back and looked at the last few years releases<p>- 23.10 - 4.8G<p>- 23.04 - 4.6G<p>- 22.10 - 3.8G<p>- 22.04 - 3.4G<p>- 21.10 - 2.9G<p>- 21.04 - 2.6G<p>- 20.10 - 2.7G<p>- 20.04 - 2.5G<p>Maybe it's a noob question, but I can't find anyone else commenting on this. Why has Ubuntu doubled in size since mid-2020? Why does it grow by so much with every new release?
Snaps (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)</a>) may have something to do with it.<p>Incidentally, Snaps are part the reason I'm abandoning Ubuntu for any of my personal machines.
It is not number of packages! 20.04 has 2977 packages and 23.10 has 1841 (from pkglist from distrowatch). After a quick eyeballing, example packages in 20.04 but NOT in 23.10: apache, g++, qemu, php, postgres, samba.<p>Also for comparison:<p>- MacOS installer ~14G [0]<p>- Windows 11 installer ~8G [1]<p>- Arch installer ~800M [2]<p>0: <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201372" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201372</a><p>1: <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11</a><p>2: <a href="https://archlinux.org/download/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archlinux.org/download/</a>
I would say: because nobody cares, "memory is cheap".<p>Same reason why software gets slower every time hardware gets faster, why everything expects a fast internet connection, or why it's impossible to <i>buy</i> a movie without DRMs (say if you want to have the file and add subtitles for your language):<p>Users don't care, they keep using/buying the non-optimized stuff. And devs are more productive (and companies make more money) by not optimizing anything.
The cloud images have been more stable in size: <a href="https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/</a>