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Mine was 663mb... But I also changed back to Linux from OSX because the window manager sucked, and there was only poor package management then.

I'd guess something between 150 MiB and 4 GiB.

40MB.

Yes, and then the installer downloads another 1-4 GB.

to be fair, a basic headless environment (aka server install) is still fairly small (~300mb) even when it includes all the standard libraries, headers, and compilers.

however, I doubt people would balk at 5gb on a laptop install as most people don't really have space limitations there.

If a linux install is 5GB, then you're choosing yourself which packages to install. Not so in this case.

I decided this in 2005, when a multi-GB download and 4GB install was relatively larger. And no it's not just a one-time thing, I had multiple laptops and I did reinstall them (adding linux to try out etc).