There's also, to my mind at least, a small confusion here. Linux itself
is tiny - there's a (fairly old, but still viable) build-it-yourself
distro out there that compiles a bootable Linux image onto a pair of
720K floppies - what causes a lot of the apparent bloat is the fact
that, with a modern Linux install, you not only get the OS itself but
also all the applications software that allows you to actually *do*
something with the computer.

Strip out OpenOffice, F-Spot and all the rest of it and what is left is
surprisingly little.