Size of Debian Linux Installation

I often need a Linux virtual machine for testing specific things. Debian Linux is my choice of Linux distribution, and I have wondered how much space does each installed package take in it, to possibly optimize the size of the VM if needed.

I installed two VMs:

1. “Normal” install: using the latest Debian 12.10 netinstall CD, text install, language English, country Finland, keyboard Finnish; unselected the preselected “Debian desktop environment” and “GNOME”, selected “SSH server” and “standard system utilities”
2. “Smaller” install: the same but without “standard system utilities”.

The results after “sudo apt clean“:

Installation	Disk usage (df -h)	Packages (dpkg -l)
Normal install	1.2 GB	330
Smaller install	1.1 GB	246

Definitely not a huge difference in the size. For the reference, I have the list of packages missing from the smaller installation in the end of the post.

I should note that these were the base installs, some other packages may be installed later on top of those, depending on the case at hand.

On the normal install I also ran a script to calculate the total size of the files per package. Here are the 20 largest packages:

Package	Size
linux-image-6.1.0-32-amd64 libicu72:amd64 libperl5.36:amd64 iso-codes coreutils grub-common perl-modules-5.36 intel-microcode locales libc6:amd64 perl-base udev libglib2.0-data systemd libpython3.11-stdlib:amd64 libmagic-mgc util-linux-locales bash python3.11-minimal xkb-data	386.89 MB 35.30 MB 27.79 MB 18.52 MB 17.34 MB 17.18 MB 16.63 MB 15.61 MB 15.11 MB 12.20 MB 10.69 MB 10.43 MB 8.93 MB 8.80 MB 7.92 MB 7.92 MB 7.71 MB 6.86 MB 6.59 MB 6.45 MB

Quite unsurprisingly, the kernel package (with all the drivers it contains) is the largest one. But otherwise, there isn’t much to gain by removing single packages from the system. Yes, if you want absolute small size, use purpose-built containers, not virtual machines.

Finally, the list of packages that were not installed if “standard system utilities” option was unchecked: