Suggestion for a GNU/Linux install process

This morning, I wasted a bit less than an hour solving errors during an apt-get dist-upgrade.

The problem? I ran out of space on the /root partition while depackaging the upgrade, causing some issues because following packages could not be extracted properly and so on. I’m not entirely sure I get everything about what went wrong exactly. Hey, I’m not a Debian packaging expert!

Anyway, it’s easy to spot the factor here: texlive.

TeXlive is a full TeX distribution. So it’s massive, it’s huge. TeX is so old, maybe that’s why (or maybe because it’s big because it’s literate programming? No idea.)

So, small suggestion for the installers out there:

At the step where the user chooses the /root partition size, maybe ask the question: “Are you going to use LaTeX on that system?” and if yes, increase the size!

(OK, I’m kidding, I should know better. Still, it would be helpful to use as much as the default settings from GNU/Linux installs as possible. Because I trust them to make more sense than I will.)