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The CD version, IIRC, is a bare bones installation. It will start downloading a bunch of other stuff depending on your installation preferences.
The reason the distro is so big is that it has a lot of redundancy and a great number of things that most distros leave to post-install setup. For example, you can set up a LAMP server just with what's on the DVD. If you want Apache, a lot of distos require you to download that later, or they are distros tweaked specifically for that and not much else. SuSE has it all right there ... plus all the KDE games, the *entire* KDE system in fact, which includes a lot of applications, a bunch of other games that consume a lot of space, etc. Their intent was to distribute a fully operable system meeting the needs of as many people and groups as possible without requiring a lot of downloads afterward.
Now, that's the intent, but it doesn't really work out like that. For the average user, what you get is the redundancy, but you'll still need to do a lot of post-install work for various things, e.g. multimedia, graphics drivers, some wireless stuff, etc.
It's a good distro to work with because it lets you play with what's available, but in the end, you're not going to need ten different kinds of calculators and half a dozen ways to play solitaire.
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