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> I still use them for flashing USBs - a lot of installs are offline, especially when the networking is some new or non-standard driver. Honestly Ubuntu restricting itself like this is a good thing, Canonical need to be kicked off of their perch.

These are not the installer ISOs, they're ISOs containing the _sources_ for all packages in Ubuntu.

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> These are not the installer ISOs, they're ISOs containing the _sources_ for all packages in Ubuntu.

I'm aware, you can install from source [1] [2]. My application is embedded devices that cannot connect to the internet that need to run blazingly fast on 'minimal' hardware for a long time. Ubuntu was chosen because we needed support for things like ROS and Nvidia.

The problem is that we would take a source image occasionally and then archive it on our infrastructure, so it looks like one download but actually services a significant number of machines.

As I mentioned previously, snap is just outright hostile. It's a massive shame for Linux to be forced to use it.

[1] https://serverfault.com/a/1080152

[2] https://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/build-architecture-o...

You can easily get the source packages for the likely small set of packages you actually need for your embedded devices instead of downloading some 30GB of ISOs of everything, most of which you don’t need. You’re basically talking about an internal mirror, and you don’t need ISOs to set up a mirror.

Also, installing from source on a fleet of embedded devices makes no sense whatsoever, the software should be cross compiled on some more powerful machine. So it’s still not clear how source ISOs are helping you “flash USBs”.

I'm aware that I'm making the case for my niche use-case, and that's going to be controversial for whatever reason. I could sit here and explain exactly why certain decisions have been made, but ultimately the point is that the ISOs that are/were provided were important for us.

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