The only "minimalist" Linux install I've ever wanted was one so stripped down it would boot off of a 3.5" floppy. It's amazing what you can do with a kernel, a baked in read-only filesystem and a tiny loopback device for storing configuration files.
Less is more.
My Arch system doesn't inundate me with pop-ups to update my system with out-of-date libraries. It doesn't integrate "the social web" into my "desktop." In fact it doesn't do anything unless I specifically want it to.
Some people are happy with everything and the kitchen sink. I don't need all of that, so why have it? It takes up resources, clutters my space, requires maintenance, and often just gets in the way for no good reason. I don't need that and Arch serves me well.
All these things are also true with Ubuntu.
(Windows is probably a worse offender with its Windows Live integration, though.)
I don't see that on my Window Maker desktop.
(People either forget or have never been told that Ubuntu is still actually Linux, and can run all the same software Arch and Slackware and CentOS can run. That's the charitable explanation, anyway.)
At some point you have to make a distinction between the desktop environment, and the increasingly meaningless term "operating system"; once you stray from the defaults, there's no point distinguishing between distros at all.
You can remove some of the defaults and not all of them. For example, I still use the default Ubuntu package repos. I'm still getting value out of the default Ubuntu system without needing to run every single default.
There's a finite distance you can run this train of thought, but i'll continue: At what point does your system stop being Ubuntu, and start being identical to someone's WindowMaker distro, customised to use ubuntu repos? (Lots of desktop debian users add ubuntu repos for the occasional package.)
On a complex system I don't know what is installed and how it's installed. It's just too big to apprehend, I will never hold all this in memory. For instance I used Ubuntu for years before discovering that I do not use 'GNU bash' at all, it was a fork called 'dash'. It may be silly and won't make a big difference, but the fact remains that I didn't know for so long. If I had bash and 10 other binaries in total on my system, I would have realized earlier. A lot earlier.
If I'm reading this right, you must be one of the very few people on Earth to use dash when you have the option to use bash.
Anyway, I don't use bash, either, but that's because I moved to zsh before Ubuntu even existed. I think I was using Slackware then.
I think you misread that. It sounds to me that he didn't realise he was using dash because it was bundled with Ubuntu and Ubuntu being a large distro with lots of defaults, it took him a long time to find this out. Your comment just validates his point because he didn't want to use dash at all, he just didn't know he was using it until a lot later (possibly after the differences already wasted his time).
Even root has /bin/bash as its log in shell.
/bin/dash is more like the original bourne shell which helps people write more portable shell scripts and it's faster(especially for startup).
Dash is also /bin/sh in Debian.
I'm pretty sure even unix V6 had > 11 binaries, http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/
maybe some systems using busbyox may have < 11 binaries.