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Provide smaller ISO flavor(s) #11104

Description

@ben-grande

The problem you're addressing (if any)

The ISO is almost reaching 8G, it doubled since 2015. This causes some problems:

  • 8G is a very common cheap thumbdrive, soon it won't be enough for a full ISO.
  • It took more than 50 minutes for me to download the ISO over WiFi
  • Torrenting is not a stable solution, over the years, few seeders and hoping they have a decent bandwidth is not so nice

Templates from testing with sizes:

>>> 599 + 862 + 1950 + 1480
4891

Historical data:

The solution you'd like

Smaller ISOs.

As I didn't check the template sizes included in the ISO, I can't reduce 8G from 4891M, but if I could loosely claim that dom0 size is 8-5=3G, than we can predict the final ISO size with that.

Base templates are Fedora and/or debian.

  • User (3 flavors, 5.6G to 6.5G): a single (or both) base template and Whonix Gateway, for updates over Tor
  • Expert (2 flavors, 5G): only a single base template, prefer Fedora due to Debian outdated drivers for networking, but also do "only Debian", because people will complain if Debian is not offered

Other flavors that people might ask is a single base template plus Whonix Workstation and Gateway (sum of both Whonix templates sizes is the same of a Debian template), so this might be viable.

This would mean that together with the full ISO, we'd have 6 flavors. If that many flavors would cause problems, I'd suggest just the following:

  • User (5.6G): Fedora with Whonix-Gateway
  • Expert (5G): Fedora

The value to a user and who that user might be

  • Users that have poor connection will be able to download the ISO faster
  • Advanced users would be able to download fresh ISOs for testing with less burden on the network

Completion criteria checklist

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    C: installerThis issue pertains to the Qubes OS installer.P: defaultPriority: default. Default priority for new issues, to be replaced given sufficient information.

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