He just look at how much empty space the file explorer showed... I don't know how good of an indication that it is. The OS may choose to conserve a decent amount of space for things like swap, hibernation file etc.

Also, preinstalled apps.

What are these sizes from? All my Linux installs start with <20G root disks and end up with some spare.

And Windows at 72G? Whilst it's more than Linux it's not that much.

How the hell is arch so large? My laptop is only 27GB and that includes all user data and several years of crap being installed as well as several docker images. A fresh install should rival that fedora install.

7GB is a reasonable size for a Linux install with a GUI and some software. The rest are excessively large. I've never gone over 30GB of disk usage in my root partition, even with a large number of programs installed.

Ya, I am not going to trust anything coming out of a post that cites that numbers for install size. As others have said, even the Windows one is bonkers.

As an EOS user myself, I love the conclusion but have no faith at all in the methodology.

If you want an article to make Linux look good, a test of the new Damn Small Linux would be interesting. It fits a basic version of practically every program you need into a 700 MB system. It also includes the APT package manager and full access to the Debian 12 stable repos so you can easily add anything you want on top of that.

It would be interesting to know what footprint it would require to run the “tests” he runs here.

My guess will be hibernation file and swap. If any of those had suspend to disk enabled, the hibernation file will be the same size as installed Ram... which can take up a good percentage of that used space. I have a pretty bloated xUbuntu install on my system right now and it's sitting at 10.6GB. Including swap and /home, but no hibernation file.

Because it runs everything stock

Shhh! Windows bad!

• Edge Flatpak: unofficial, using zypak, same app on every Distro. Also launch times are damn irrelevant
• "storage used" is likely just the DEs filesystem abstraction

I was very very surprised about Ubuntu starting so fast. Afaik they preload Snaps now, which should increase that startup time.

I think it depends on kernel/software/driver versions and will vary when these change. Also bloatware is a thing, even though it doesn't affect the results very significantly

Different distros build their packages with different options and have different versions of those packages so the Ubuntu and fedora php packages might have an optimization the arch one didn't

Still updating

Opensuse? WHERES GENTOO

selinux probably

I don't remember such videos. Though there should be Windows vs Linux benckmarks for popular games that support both operating systems (natively or with Wine)