We’ve all heard the “my 100TB NAS is full of Linux ISOs” joke but how many of you actually hoard ISOs? I just noticed I have ~100GB, so not that many though definitely way more than I need (I just like to try new distros on my VMs and I never delete them after).
Yeah, keeping the needed packages around would ballon storage size if you want to do it for an entire directory of distro isos, especially if you’re interested in historic releases (e.g. for hardware compatibility). I’ve actually been experimenting with using locally saved packages lately, mostly because HDD+ethernet is about 20 times faster than downloading packages off the internet for me. It’s fine as a cache if you’re managing several instances of the same distro, but if you want to full-on install several different distros/releases off HDD you’ll need to seriously invest in storage space. Might be worth it though … hmmmmm.