I've got a Thinkpad on which I replaced the hard-disk with a 128 GB SSD and installed Ubuntu on it (using fulldisk encryption with dm-crypt / LUKS).
I've got about 100 GB of usable space after having installed a shit ton of apps, libraries and utilities I needed, stuff like Emacs, OpenJDK (with sources), IntelliJ IDEA, RVM with dozens of Java/Scala libraries downloaded through Maven/SBT, dozens of ruby gems, dozens of Python libraries, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Memcached, Gimp, Dropbox, GCC, many header/dev packages, some games and the list can go on.
I should mention that I'm not using a Swap, because I've got enough RAM and as long as I've got Suspend, I don't care about Hibernation.
But I'm talking about Ubuntu 12.10, which is probably the most bloated Linux distribution I ever used. What the hell is in Windows or OS X that takes so much space?
My Windows 8 Pro is 19.2 GiB (on disk). Of which 9.67 GiB is WinSxS. Which is essentially a giant component library containing dozens of different versions of DLLs third party programs use.
1.67 GiB is the driver store. 1.36 GiB is the 32 bit sub-system (SysWoW64). 700 MiB is the .Net framework (versions 1 through 4). So now we're down to 5.94 GiB of "stuff" which we can call the "OS" if you'd like, without any compatibility bits.
Linux is so tiny because Linux has a terrible backwards compatibility record. Fortunately this is hard to spot because the distro's do such a great job of hiding it (and automate much of that via their respective package managers).
But if Linux DID care about backwards compatibility at every level then the OS would be huge too, since you'd need tons of old libraries built in, tons of drivers for redundant hardware, and gunk like that.
I've got about 100 GB of usable space after having installed a shit ton of apps, libraries and utilities I needed, stuff like Emacs, OpenJDK (with sources), IntelliJ IDEA, RVM with dozens of Java/Scala libraries downloaded through Maven/SBT, dozens of ruby gems, dozens of Python libraries, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Memcached, Gimp, Dropbox, GCC, many header/dev packages, some games and the list can go on.
I should mention that I'm not using a Swap, because I've got enough RAM and as long as I've got Suspend, I don't care about Hibernation.
But I'm talking about Ubuntu 12.10, which is probably the most bloated Linux distribution I ever used. What the hell is in Windows or OS X that takes so much space?