Four Debian 13 Boxes, One Brief: 1,923 Packages on Metal, 328 in the Cloud
This article covers one afternoon of running the same Debian 13 on four machines — one laptop and three clouds — and asking each of them the same question about its own hardware. A cloud image is not a small Debian. It is a different bet about what you will need. The laptop install carries 1,923 packages. The three cloud images carry 328, 337 and 350. That is not a rounding difference, and the…
The author conducted a comparison of Debian 13 installed on four different machines: one laptop and three cloud instances. The laptop had 1,923 packages installed, while the three cloud instances had 328, 337, and 350 packages respectively. All four machines booted from NVMe storage, but only two of them shipped firmware packages and logs.
AWS and Azure did not ship any nvme-cli tools, while GCE shipped both dmidecode and nvme-cli. AWS had a backup GPT header, and GCE fixed a warning that appeared during boot. The AWS and Azure instances were the same Debian 13 build running the same kernel, while GCE had a newer build. To properly measure the installed packages, the author launched a clean instance without any user-data scripts and used dpkg to scan for installed packages instead of relying on command -v.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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