 don't normally pay attention that much to the Ubuntu release cycle most of the features that come out are just kind of minor improvements but every once in a while there's a feature that I cover on the channel but for the most part Ubuntu just kind of keeps on keeping on if you know what I mean it just slowly gets better and just does what Ubuntu has always done but today I was reading an article over on OMG Ubuntu and on OMG Ubuntu Joey has made an argument that the next release of Ubuntu 23.10 is making a huge mistake when it comes to the amount of packages that they're including on the ISO so apparently in 23.10 they're not only getting rid of the minimal install option in the installer but they're also going to be making the default installation much more minimal itself so you're not going to be getting anything like an office suite or a image editing application or a mp3 or slash video application things like that none of that stuff will come pre-installed now Joey here argues that Ubuntu's main audience or at least part of their audience is new to Linux users and those new to Linux users may or may not be able to find the applications that they want also they're not going to have a great experience if they have to install basically everything themselves right out of the box so Joey makes the argument that Ubuntu is better when it has at least a default experience set up right out of the box if you want to be able to play a movie or if you want to listen to music if you want to edit a document if you want to crop a picture you can do all those things right out of the box but once 23.10 launches that will no longer be the case they've gone a little bit too minimal now I will link this article down below so that you can read the rest of Joey's argument I don't want to just sit here and read all of the article to you because it's just easier if you go and do it yourself but what I wanted to talk about today is twofold first I want to talk about Ubuntu itself and whether or not this idea of them becoming more minimal is a good or bad idea just kind of the content of the article and we'll talk about that for briefly but I also want to talk about the merits of minimal distros and the idea specifically that minimalism is both good or bad and I want to talk about my opinion on which side of that argument I come down on so let's go ahead and jump in but before we do if you leave a like on this video I'd really appreciate it it would really help the channel so first let's talk about Ubuntu specifically so in 23.10 they're going to be removing a lot of software in order to make the ISO more minimal right and they want to the goal here at least supposedly is to make that initial ISO download smaller and make it so that there's less things there for them to maintain if you want actual choice in installing stuff you can then install afterwards now I believe I've read somewhere and I may have just picked this up on some random blocks or whether or not it's true or not I don't want to claim that it is but I've heard that they're going to be adding some options to the installer where you can actually install stuff during installation so that if you wanted an office suite you could check a box or something that now whether or not that actually ends up getting pushed through maybe it was just a proposal or something like that I don't know but if that's the direction they're going then this all is going to be no big deal in the end right if that's not the way they go a more minimal ISO on Ubuntu for me personally does not make much sense simply because Ubuntu does have an audience that is less nerd like than the rest of the Linux community and I say that with a hundred percent love but a lot of the Ubuntu community when they or I should let should say a lot of people who come to Ubuntu either are very new Linux users or very very new Linux users and they've never really had to build a distribution up from the ground up they've never had to install all their applications that they probably don't even know what applications are actually available now Joey in his article does make the point that it's really easy to go into the software center and install applications and that's true but you have to know what those applications are and one of the greatest ways to experience Linux is to try things and you don't want to have to download things to try them it's kind of like it's kind of like the free samples cards you get to see at the supermarket every once in a while you go in and you try a piece of whatever and you get to try it and then you get to buy it so it's kind of like that whereas you have a distribution you want to be able to try things you've been you've managed to install it which is the hardest part and you want to have an experience which is complete by making it super minimal they're making it not complete so you're not going to have an office suite you're not going to have an image editor or an image viewer you're not going to have certain applications that you probably would want to have if you want to try out a distribution and see how it works now obviously some distributions go too far and think that they have to install literally everything under the sun so those start to become more bloated so we've all seen the distributions that install three MP3 players four video players they have a couple email applications that five browsers we've seen those distributions I've talked about them on the channel I've looked at them here on the channel and those are all like what are you doing man we don't need five different browsers unless you have a specific like actual need for them like your penetration testing or your testing websites or something like that it's like development browser distro thing right those words were supposed to be in a certain order I'm sure that they weren't in the right order I just kind of spew them out it doesn't matter but you guys get the idea right so we have two ends of the spectrum and seems like Ubuntu is navigating towards the other one the problem here isn't that they're going super minimal it's that their audience expects a complete experience and by removing some software from that ISO that experience is no longer complete Joey in his article also explains how in certain developing countries internet is a problem and you have to download more stuff after install I don't think that this argument holds up all that much because if you were going to install the ISO you're going to be using that bandwidth whether it's during the ISO download or post install so if you're going to be using that bandwidth it doesn't really matter when you use it I would say if the argument was then that people would be getting the ISO in a non downloadable fashion like they've purchased a USB key or something like that with Ubuntu on it so they're not using the internet at all then this does become a little bit of a problem whereas they'd have to then use the internet in order to get the mainline applications that they want so that's an argument you can I can really go either way on that one I can see the point I'm not sure if it was well argued or not but the whole minimal idea for Ubuntu does bother me a little bit because the audience is so now I know that there are a lot of longtime Ubuntu users out there the thing is is that when you argue that the longtime Linux users or a longtime Ubuntu users are people who just install uninstall the stuff anyways that's okay because making those guys uninstall stuff making them go out of their way to do something extra afterwards while it's not necessarily great customer service it's those are the people who you can upset right because their longtime Ubuntu users they're not going to go flying away from Ubuntu probably just because they have to uninstall a few things because that's what they've always had to do like if they don't want Ubuntu if they don't want LibreOffice they have always uninstalled LibreOffice right when you are creating an ISO like this and you want to appeal to new users if that is the case with Ubuntu we could argue whether or not they still want to attract new users we can have that conversation another time but if they do want to attract new users they have to kind of keep in mind that new users do want that complete experience and you don't want new users who are just coming to Linux are much more likely to hop to a different distro or go back to Windows than your longtime Ubuntu users so you want to have that first experience that first impression to be really really good otherwise they're going to go elsewhere now that's not that big of a deal I mean we really don't want them to go back to Windows but hopefully they'll at least if they do leave Ubuntu they'll go to another Linux distro but the idea is that you want that first experience to be as good as possible and by going so super minimal maybe that's not no longer the case with Ubuntu so that's the Ubuntu thing let's go ahead and then and jump in and talk about the minimal ISO argument overall like more broadly and you can obviously name the distributions that you'd consider super minimal right you you'd consider like puppy Linux and peppermint and arch and gen 2 you know all these distributions that are very very low and they're either all the way put together like puppy or peppermint or you literally build them up from scratch right you can think of you know arch or gen 2 or Debian or something like that with it where they have very minimal installations and you build them up to your specifications during installation right so those are the minimal distributions and then on the other end of the spectrum we have things like Geruda we have things like Arco those distributions that are very opinionated when it comes to what comes installed but also give you a ton of options for literally everything the installation probably is going to take two or three times as long as an Ubuntu install simply because it gives you a ton of different options now Arco does have their minimal or beginner user installation so you know you can go a little bit different direction that but the point of Arco has always been giving the user as much choice as possible and that does at times make it seem much more bloated than things on the other end of the spectrum right so obviously many distributions have come down on one side or the other for me personally I don't care one way or the other but I do think and you may have suss this out when I was talking about the Ubuntu stuff that whether or not you're in a minimal distribution or not does dictate quite a bit whether or not your user or new user focused so the more minimal you are I would argue the less user-friendly you are now that isn't always whole true because you can talk about puppy linux and you can talk about peppermint both of those are very good for new users because they're ready to go right of the box but they are minimal so the argument doesn't hold up 100% of the time but in a lot of cases the more minimal distros do tend to be less user-friendly simply because I shouldn't say user-friendly but less ready to go right of the box because the user has to take extra steps post install to get to the place where they need to be in order to make it fully useful right it's not necessarily a bad thing but it does make it less new user-friendly because those extra steps post install are steps that the new user may or may not know that they need to take or how to take them right and a lot of times it's just a matter of opening up the software center but then they have to know what things to download and having some things pre-installed that they can just click on and like if they click on LibreOffice they're going to know hey well that's still an office program right if they click on VLC oh this thing plays videos okay it's pre-installed now I know I can do those things and I've already learned that those programs do certain things whereas if I have to go into a software center in order to do those things I have to actively search out different things and also and this is one of the things that Joey says in his article where he searched for office in Genome Software or in the Snapsnore probably and LibreOffice wasn't even in the top five or six results it was all weird things like sublime text and stuff like that so you have to deal with the quirkiness of software centers as well none of them do a fantastic job of discovery and none of them really do I mean they have gotten way better over the years but they're still lacking in that area so that that's a problem for me so when a distribution is super minimal I consider it mostly not always but mostly less user-friendly or less new user-friendly I should say than a distribution that has more added onto it now obviously you can go too far and I think that even going so far as to go to the other end of the spectrum so if we talk about ARCO that's not new user-friendly either so there is a happy medium here that I think is a good place for distributions to be you don't want to be so minimal that you don't provide a good experience out of the box but you also don't want to provide your users with so many choices not only pre-installed but during installation that it just confuses the hell out of them right you don't want to I mean the vast majority of new Linux users probably don't know what Intel or AMD microcode actually is so they don't know which one to choose I know that if my mother or my niece or nephew decided they're going to install Linux they probably wouldn't be able to tell you what processor was actually in their computer now I always base the level of normieism normie norminess the level of the person being in normie I'm going to come up with a word for that eventually based on the people that I know right and the normal people in my life don't pay a lot of attention to what's in their their software so or in their hardware so asking them to make choices for dependencies that they need in order for their computer to run probably not a good idea also you don't want to have them to have to make choices between different offer suites or different video players or stuff like that so the best new user distros I would argue are those that are very opinionated but also somewhere in the middle of minimal and bloated so things that and I would say that prior to the 23.10 changes Ubuntu hit this right on the on the nose because they included LibreOffice you had an office suite they had a they had Thunderbirds so you had an email client they had I think they had rhythm box for music right I'm not sure what they had for oh they probably had you know videos for videos so they had all the the major main things that you would want installed out of the box so you could just go to Ubuntu and you could use it that's the perfect new user distro it has all the stuff now if you want extra stuff you want if you need CAD stuff or you need if you want to change your browsers then you make that extra effort to go search out that software but the initial first use experience is all set and ready to go you can do literally everything you'd want to do at least in terms of basic stuff right out of the box once you go to minimal that experience falls apart once you go to bloated it becomes too confusing so the best new user experiences for a Linux distro are right down the middle when the distro maintainer has made the choices for the user out of the box now it doesn't mean that they are going to be forced to use those things they can obviously uninstall stuff they can reinstall different options all that stuff that's what makes Linux great but the whole point of a Linux distro and I think Joey makes this argument as well in his article is that distros should be opinionated things that the distro maintainer is presenting to you right the distro has made choices for you that's what draws you to a certain distros so if you are someone who really likes options but likes all the gooey stuff maybe arco is the way to go if you really like the design look of garuda you could that's the way to go maybe the same thing with menjaro you really like the way menjaro looks you like the idea of arch but maybe it's a little bit stable all of these opinionated opinions that the distro maintainers have made is what draws people to a certain distro over another once you take out the opinionated stuff that goes into a distro and just makes it make it super minimal it's no longer a full and complete distribution it's just a minimal iso so to me personally like I said I think that the minimal idea is fantastic for people who are longtime linux users people who understand and pretty much know the things that go around linux you they know all these application options they help they already have their preferences baked in whether or not they like gimp over crita or kaden live over olive or whatever you know they have all their preferences and they can they're always going to go make those choices post install anyways they probably have a script to do it because they're nerds when it comes to new linux users they don't have that experience so having a template out of the box helps them and I think that in broad sense not just in a on the abound to thing but in a broad sense the more opinionated distros that are able to hone it so that it's not not bloated but well opinionated and has all the things that you need to do right of the box I think those are the best in the comment section below where do you come down on this what's better a minimal distribution or a bloated distribution or is it better right down the center like I think so in the comment section below let me know what you think if you haven't already leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it you guys are awesome for doing so it really does help the channel you can follow me on mass it 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