What Is the Ubuntu Mini ISO? (And How to Use It)
The size of the Ubuntu ISO images has been growing steadily, year-on-year. As more applications are added to it, or deprecated, smaller packages are replaced with newer, larger, packages the ISO inevitably increases in size.
Some of this will be due to using Snaps for some of the pre-installed applications. Snaps pay for their immunity from dependency hell though an increase in size. Each Snap package contains its own sandboxed environment and bundles copies of dependencies such as library files. This leads to file duplication.
The Ubuntu installation program has always had an option to install a minimalist version of Ubuntu, with just a few essential applications. It was mooted, but never implemented, for that to be the only option in the installation program for Ubuntu 23.10, the Mantic Minotaur.
What happened instead was the two installation options were flipped, with the pre-selected minimal installation option taking the top spot. If you want the “everything including the kitchen sink” version, you must make a conscious decision to select it during installation.
And even if the minimalist option gives you a minimalist Ubuntu, to get your hands on it, you’ve still got to download the same, large, ISO image. All 5.2GB of it, at the last count.