Looking for small distro for ardiour only

I don’t like to configure my daily driver for ardour. I use kdeNeon but when I installed kdeNeon on a second 10 gb partition, the uefi (or something) was overwritten and pointing into the new partition’s grub. It was impossible to set back with help from linux/unix stackexchange. (I tried everything, even boot repair) . Deleting the second partition was death and nonrecoverable even with boot repair again (when it was really needed). I lost both partitions and had to rebuild my daily driver.
My guess is that it was the same distro installed twice which caused confusion.

Back to the present:
So I tried kubuntu, but it won’t let me install on 10gb (I think it is 11gb).
I don’t see the option to exclude grub unless it is another physical drive.

Is there a distro that allows you to install with 10gb?
Is there a distro that allows you to install without grub?

Try AV Linux. The ISO is 3.6GB - some of that is compressed, but I don’t know how big it comes to when installed. It was originally designed for small, older systems, though it’s inevitable grown a bit since the early days.
It uses GRUB, though. I don’t know how you’d avoid that.

Alternatively, many distros offer a minimal install ISO, with the intention that you complete the install off the net, choosing the packages you need. You might be able to use that to keep the size down. Debian certainly does this, and if you choose the XFCE desktop you shouldn’t get too much bloat.

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That’s not usually a problem. I have a few distros including two Arch installations on different partitions that I can choose in grub.

grub can be a bit of a pest at times.

What’s the problem with that? As long as your original installation is available in grub. Too late now, but the way to fix this would have been :

  • boot into the original install
  • run sudo update-grub or whatever the appropriate command is on your distro
  • reboot

Sorry to hear you lost stuff however it was preventable.

I tried all of that stuff to recover my grub but it did not work. I tried installing grub and doing the update. Nope… then I tried efibootmgr … nope… then i tried boot-repair nope… boot repair advanced… nope. I deleted my smaller ardour parition… and then it was not recoverable with boot repair at all. No data was lost… just lots of data packets from mobile to fix again.

I’m looking at kubuntu which requires 20 gb to install. But that does not mean I can’ t shrink the drive afterwards. It still uses the ubiquity installer, so I should be okay to install with out grub.
I’m taking a 5 day sim break starting today… so I will shelve the install for a later date.

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