Arch Linux

USB flash drives have pretty much taken over.

True but then again, Some older hardware cannot boot from them.
Older hardware support is/has been one of the beauties of Linux.

Furthermore; On that note, so have PiXiE servers; but they are typically beyond the experience level of the typical home LAN user looking to jump to Arch.

Regardless; Keeping CD images within CD size constraints is not a far out request.
We are trying to conserve bandwidth with minimal images so why defeat the purpose of them?

Universally available to all of the world; where some hardware options are just not available.

Being able to recycle old machines, especially laptops like I do helps keep machines out of the landfills - given that most people do not look for e-cyclers.

24 MB ! - Is not a hard thing to do.

And will grow more...

The 650M/700M limit was "informally" deprecated long time ago, look at arch-releng ML. For example here [#1].

I understand the point about older hardware. Anyway "waste space" is relative, apart of I personally do not use CD/DVD since years, long time ago DVD units replaced CD, and CD-R and DVD-R has same price, even sometimes $ CD-R > $ DVD-R!.

In any case you can unpack the ISO and repack again without X86_64 image, thats all.

[#1] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2011-May/thread.html#1718

Is not there a way to boot from a usb from a CD?

I mean, if booting from an usb is the problem we just can release a minidisk containig something to boot from that usb (I think once I see that in a supergrubdisk or old distro).

thinks will look like this

boot disk -> use disk utility to boot the content of the connected USB -> boot the usb

this will either help with the problem of botting from usb in non-usb-booting capable and aligerate the problem of cd space.

Sure, burn syslinux+kernel+initrd, the archiso hook will look for archisodevice/label, ie the usbdisk with squashfs image ;)

If you really want to decrease the size of the iso you'll probably have better luck doing it one package or feature at a time.

Featurewise, here is the top-level contents of the iso: https://projects.archlinux.org/archiso.git/tree/configs/releng/packages.both

Obviously less features means less packages means less size, but each of those was put in at someone's request. You could easily make a small iso yourself by deleting anything in there you don't want, and then running the build scripts.

The second way takes a bit more work but is more likely to actually work. Explore all those packages and their dependencies. See where the size comes from. Maybe there is a huge dependency being dragged in, and it could be made optional? This also helps reduce the install size for everyone else, too. But it is going to be a lot of work to find opportunities like that. Here's what the ISO's web of dependencies looks like: http://kmkeen.com/tmp/arch-iso-2016.png

(The size reported is the uncompressed size for a single architecture. Compressed size matters more for the ISO.)

Well for starters how necessary are nmap and clonezilla as essentials right off the bat?
-- How many users are looking to scan networks and capture packets from an install ISO?
-- Clonezilla is typically used via it's own live CD...
-- How many users are looking to Clone drives when they download an install image for Arch?

I don't know but those 2 right there are pretty obvious candidates to me that are probably exceeding the 24 MB issue.

Arch Linux Downloads
Release Info

---> "The image can be burned to a CD," (Umm, no it can't!) <--- mounted as an ISO file, or be directly written to a USB stick using a utility like `dd`. ---> "It is intended for new installations only;" (Not Cloning drives or Scanning networks!) <--- an existing Arch Linux system can always be updated with `pacman -Syu`.

Current Release: 2016.04.01
Included Kernel: 4.4.5
---> ISO Size: 724.0 MB <---

Hmmmm....

nmap (6M compressed) yeah can be removed, clonezilla (less than 1M), tcpdump (300K) and is really good to debug connection issues, you need to remove more things...

In some way, these can be some candidates: nmap, mc/gpm (I like it), vim-runtime/vim (many people like it)

PS: I always use clonezilla from Arch Linux, and we are linked from the homepage ;) http://clonezilla.org/related-live-cd

You could have just made the ISO image not a dual one, but only for one specific architecture. I have done this myself and it *severely* decreased the image size.
I have made an ISO for my university and it is 600M~ with graphical desktop and various useful utilities.

Sure, I personally do the same, but for releng purposes dual ISO only, was voted some years ago. Maybe anybody can send an email with a new proposal to arch-releng mailing list.

EDIT: ISO size is now 743M

Vote, comments, etc here: https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2016-May/003691.html