I can haz smoller NixOS ISOs?

A perfectly ordinary quest to make a smaller startup disc for NixOS — a Linux system beloved by power users — somehow turned into a full-on comment-section soap opera. The original post starts with a shocking reveal: the basic disc image weighs in at 458MB, which is a lot for something that barely does anything yet. The author then goes on a ruthless diet plan, peeling back what’s taking up space and asking the question that launched a thousand nerd side-eyes: why is the “minimal” version still so chunky?

The crowd absolutely ate it up. One camp showed up with heart emojis and practical enthusiasm: people said it was a “nice adventure,” “super useful,” and exactly the kind of tinkering they want before jumping ship from other Linux systems. Another group immediately turned it into a lifestyle debate. One commenter grumbled that core tools like Perl, Python, and Bash being required is “unfortunate,” while another became weirdly evangelical, declaring NixOS “the one OS to rule them all” after swapping kernels like it was changing outfits.

But the real drama came from the skeptics. When the post suggested you could shrink things further by turning off Nix itself, one commenter basically hit the brakes and asked: if you don’t even want Nix installed, do you actually want NixOS at all? Ouch. That line turned the whole project from clever optimization into a tiny identity crisis, which is exactly the kind of deliciously nerdy meltdown the internet lives for.