> 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...