> SSDs aren't exactly stellar in the cost-per-TB department

First of all, 1TB for binaries and libraries may as well be infinite. Secondly, you can get a 1TB SSD for under $100, which is pretty damned inexpensive when you consider it took until 2009 to get HDDs that affordable.

On a desktop, sure. Now that more and more laptops are starting to have soldered-down storage, this argument falls apart.

If you have a laptop with only half a gig soldered in you get what you pay for.

It's almost as bad as complaining about having trouble running modern stuff with your 286

It's plentiful relative to the size of compiled or source code. E.g the biggest .so file on this system right now is a <150MB libxul.so. That's only used by one piece of software anyway, and the drop-off is pretty steep after that. A 64GB drive (tiny these days) can fit more than four hundred of that unusually large file.

> cost-per-TB

There you have it: You measure in TB, not gigabytes, not megabytes.

Python packages are megabytes.

Not if they pull in all of their dependencies, PyQt would have a complete copy of all Qt binaries and a complete chrome install because of course Qt includes a browser based html viewer. Python packages are gigabytes.

What distro is pulling PyQt as a dependency of Python? There is a difference between "dependency" and "every package which has the word python in the description".

PyQt only contains the bindings. You share the same Qt environment across your system (hence qmake needs to be in your path). The python package itself is not that big (~10 MB).

The comment on top of this chain is about letting every package specify its own versioned dependencies. So how would that global version work out when python needs 5.1 and some other software specifies 5.2?

Qt minor releases are backwards binary and source compatible, but not forward. Therefore this would not be an issue.

That guarantee only applies to Qt itself, I would expect that the newer Qt binary was also compiled against all the other newest versions of its own dependencies. Good luck finding a backwards compatibility promise for all of them.

Fortunately there are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte and nobody is using a system with single or double digit gigs of storage anymore.

Unless you are trying to save a buck it seems 1TB is the standard today. My primary desktop has 4.

> Unless you are trying to save a buck it seems 1TB is the standard today.

I suppose part of the problem is that while getting a 1 TB SSD instead of a 512 GB or even 256 GB one may not be overly expensive (for a middle-class person in a wealthy country anyway), due to the way OEM laptop product lines are often stratified, you may need to either buy your 1 TB SSD separately or get an altogether higher-specced model than your perhaps otherwise would. The latter especially isn't cheap.

There might be some customization options but sometimes little customization is available. That's probably one of the ways people end up with relatively small-capacity SSDs.

It's kind of similar as with RAM: a higher capacity isn't that much more expensive in theory, but in practice it may be.

This is irrelevant for custom-build desktops but lots of people are running only laptops nowadays. I'd like to see better customizability for the builds, as well as upgradability and replaceability, but the options are often limited.

> Unless you are trying to save a buck it seems 1TB is the standard today.

Buying a 1TB external SSD would more than double the cost of a raspberry pi 4 that and my ancient beagle board does fine running from 32 GB.

> My primary desktop has 4.

Those are rookie numbers for a primary system. Of course my Office system next to it is a lot lower specked with the test system next to it even lower.

Embedded systems really shouldn't be brought into play here but even then a 256 GB uSD card for the Pi is $25 dollars and itself far overkill. My entire primary desktop OS, firmware, DEs, and very extensive package set fits in 15 GB. Multiplying my primary system by 10 and sticking it on a Pi taking $25 of storage with plenty to spare is still not an argument against binary sizes, especially since there are niche distro spins used for that niche space anyways.

Eh I think embedded systems are a different class. I know some people run RPis as their desktops but they are definitely the minority.

>Those are rookie numbers for a primary system

4TB suits my needs and use case fine. And tha'ts not counting my NAS.

The eMMC on a Beaglebone Black is 4GB. Sure you can boot off an SD card but that's less robust (though, I guess you can use the SD card for all your virtualenvs...).

A typical virtualenv for a project I work on is > 500 MB. That adds up.

Text (eg python source code) is really quite small. Far too small to count unless you're a distro specifically targeting low-end machines.