D.2. Disk Space Needed for Tasks

A standard installation for the amd64 architecture, including all standard packages and using the default kernel, takes up 971MB of disk space. A minimal base installation, without the Standard system task selected, will take 769MB.

[Important] Important

In both cases this is the actual disk space used after the installation is finished and any temporary files deleted. It also does not take into account overhead used by the file system, for example for journal files. This means that significantly more disk space is needed both during the installation and for normal system use.

The following table lists sizes reported by aptitude for the tasks listed in tasksel. Note that some tasks have overlapping constituents, so the total installed size for two tasks together may be less than the total obtained by adding up the numbers.

By default the installer will install the GNOME desktop environment, but alternative desktop environments can be selected either by using one of the special installation images, or by specifying the desired desktop environment during installation (see Section 6.3.6.2, “Selecting and Installing Software”).

Note that you will need to add the sizes listed in the table to the size of the standard installation when determining the size of partitions. Most of the size listed as Installed size will end up in /usr and in /lib; the size listed as Download size is (temporarily) required in /var.

Task Installed size (MB) Download size (MB) Space needed to install (MB)
Desktop environment      
  • GNOME (default) 2790 786 3576
  • KDE Plasma 4122 1212 5334
  • Xfce 2187 621 2808
  • LXDE 2271 653 2924
  • MATE 2574 711 3285
  • Cinnamon 4197 1251 5448
Web server 44 11 55
SSH server 2 0 2

If you install in a language other than English, tasksel may automatically install a localization task, if one is available for your language. Space requirements differ per language; you should allow up to 350MB in total for download and installation.