I also raised an eyebrow at the three web browsers, but then I was thinking that it's quite likely that none of them are reliable for opening a modern webpage, so users might have to routinely try more than one.

I'm more amused by the inclusion of a GUI application for SCP and FTP. As someone who uses a full-featured desktop Linux distro as my daily driver, and uses SCP on a daily basis, I've never felt the need for anything but the CLI for that.

Also a number of games?

To be fair, the page states that "The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD," so it is explicitly more about showcasing a collection of lightweight applications than it is about providing the smallest distro.

> All the applications are chosen for their functionality, small size, and low dependencies

I wouldn't mind a few extra mb of software if it improves my overall user experience. The nice thing about DSL is that its slim despite having a pretty comprehensive app suite.

The original DSL had a similar redundancies in its available applications. Even more so for DSL-N, which was free to break the "under 50MB" rule but still stayed remarkably tiny and efficient. That was one of the things that made DSL so cool: "I can get multiple browsers, a full office suite, multimedia tools, and even games on a bootable disk that fits in my wallet? Hell yeah!".

Program sizes have ballooned by an order of magnitude or more, so unfortunately so must DSL's target size if it expects to retain feature-parity, but it's still a lot of bang for one's disk-space buck by the looks of it.

And how much space do those packages take?