Raspberry Pi Forums

just wondered why RASPBIAN is such a large file size ? compared to a full desktop OS, for example

if i had to guess, i'd have thought it would be significantly smaller, considering the raspberry pi is quite a low power device

or is it simply that no one felt the need to optimise it for file size as much ? maybe RASPBIAN is aimed more at personal than enterprise uses ?

dr.meow wrote:just wondered why RASPBIAN is such a large file size ? compared to a full desktop OS, for example

Raspbian *is* a 'full desktop OS'

if i had to guess, i'd have thought it would be significantly smaller, considering the raspberry pi is quite a low power device

Size of the image depends on number / size of installed packages, it has nothing to do with the speed of the computer.

maybe RASPBIAN is aimed more at personal than enterprise uses ?

Neither, it is aimed more at educational use, and for that purpose several extra packages are pre-installed. Some of these take quite a bit of space (Mathematica for example).

There are several 'leaner' distros floating around, see for example the 'OS' section of the forum (specifically the 'other' section)

dr.meow wrote:just wondered why RASPBIAN is such a large file size ? compared to a full desktop OS, for example

What OS are you comparing it to?

Compared to a "full" desktop OS (whatever that means) Raspbian is tiny. For example, a clean, just installed Windows 8.1 takes about 20GB of space.
There are some default applications you might not want to have in your Raspbian that take some respectable space, like Wolfram/Mathematica which if you uninstall you can free about 500MB.
If you are in need of something minimal that is still all Raspbian, you can try DietPi which is the equivalent of a Debian netinstall.