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13 Answers
13

I am guessing it has something to do with wanting to make it available to as many people as possible, while the hardware isn't the real issue, the amount of time it would take to download a 1+gb is rather long. Plus, not everyone has high speed internet, or have limits, say 5gbs a month... which a 4 gb download would eat it all up in one download.

That it uses DVD doesn't mean that it will be full 4,7 GB. It can perfectly be 2gb. Also I doubt that if you have a FAT32 partition (Windows 98), your hardware will support Ubuntu. If you want it for a server I doubt you will choose the desktop edition. Pick the server edition instead.
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IgnacioOct 28 '10 at 23:36

@Ignacio: Ubuntu works fine on my 10 year old Pentium III that came with Win98 originally, and it works fine on older hardware than that.
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JanCOct 29 '10 at 8:56

@Ignacio: I use FAT32 partitions even now because NTFS is more dangerous to write under Linux, and so do a lot of other people. IMHO it will be fully safe to write earliest in the year 2014.
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iugamarianNov 1 '10 at 0:04

In countries like mine it pays to keep the installation media pretty small. What you install after is a matter of choice and ability. I do agree that a DVD version with some more umph would be great though.

I don't want more apps. I'm already uninstalling a bunch of unwanted apps and bulky libraries they depend on after a fresh install. Why should I have to download them just to have to get rid of them? Adding apps from repos is easy and results in less wasted bandwidth.

Sure, I install a lot of extra apps that aren't currently ubuntu-desktop deps. But they're probably not the same ones you install.

they don't include VLC because it doesn't fit so instead they include Totem which is a much worse player.

Well that's very much a matter of opinion. VLC's a great player, in particular for its format support, but Totem, as a standard part of the GNOME desktop, fits the UI much better. All the Gstreamer stuff is coming along anyway, so installing the comparatively small Totem front-end is a no-brainer.

So I install VLC, yes, but could I claim it's an essential for the average desktop user? No. Indeed, parts of its interface, like the playlist, are pretty clumsy and newbie-hostile.

Live CD and Instalation would be faster, since they wouldn't need compression at all

The installation process is disk IO-bound. The CPU usage from decompression is not a bottleneck.

I don't believe that increasing the size of the disk image would allow Canonical to include more applications as the ~700MB CD image, when expanded and installed, eventually takes up ~4GB of drive space anyway.

There's no need to include an advanced application such as VLC as most average computer users have no need for it, and that's who Ubuntu is targeted at, and Totem fulfils their needs (and mine as a semi-power user and developer). If someone is in a situation where they need to use programs like VLC, GIMP and Inkscape, then they probably already know that they exist and how to get them.

Ubuntu's (this applied to Linux in general TBH) strength is that it meets the requirements of the majority of users with a footprint considerably smaller than that of Windows, and in fact I think during each development cycle Canonical should be finding ways to streamline the size of Ubuntu, not increase it.