I was simply picking 2 extremes. The real interest here is the midpoint, which is Plan 9. The 9front image is half a gig, and that too includes everything: app

I was simply picking 2 extremes. The real interest here is the midpoint, which is Plan 9. The 9front image is half a gig, and that too includes everything: apps, demos, games, the entire thing. As I said: « “The kernel is 5,119,091 bytes - 5MB or so. “The entire distribution including all sources, documents, local Git repository and binaries is circa 530MB for amd64.” The Plan 9 kernel has 38 system calls. I’ve not been able to find a firm number for Linux, but I have some estimates. As of 2016, kernel 4.7 had about 335. By 2017 that was up to 341. I’ve tried to estimate the number for kernel 6.8 and I think there are 520 across all architectures. » ISTM that you're obsessing over the exact position of one end, whereas in fact, given that we are talking of a difference of roughly 5 orders of magnitude -- five zeroes -- it would make no difference at all if we included every program ever written for every variant of Oberon that ever existed, and the most minimal possible Debian system that can run two shells at once. Debian 12 is on the order of 150,000 lines of code for every single line of A2.