The Lubuntu distribution needs only 4 GB of discspace in the basic installation. Compared to 10 GB of mainstream distribution this is very little. The key is not located in a certain compiler flag but it has to do with the certain packages. Lubuntu is based on LXDE and abiword, but not on Gnome and LibreOffice. This helps to save a lot of space.
Let us take a look how much dependencies are generated by standard Linux packages. After installing the Lyx program, the complete texlive software is installed too. Does anybody need such bloatware? A potential alternative is abiword which needs only 20 MB plus cherrytree which is lightweight notetaking software. Sure, Lyx provides more features, but the price is, that the development team needs to implment all these features. The main problem with Linux is, that the number of developers is small and it make sense to spend manhours wisely. I do not see that the future of the Linux desktop is about LaTeX, Gnome and Java, but it has to do with small software which runs fast.
Sure, a modern computer doesn't has hardware limitations. If a Linux distribution needs 25 GB of harddrive space nobody cares, because the price for an SSD is low and fast internet connections are available. What is a bottleneck is the codelines who have to be created. The best example for bloatware in the Linux ecosystem is LaTeX. A closer look into the code will show that the project is way to big. Sure, it can produce beautiful documents but for which price? Or let me give another example. There are two IDE available under Linux: the first is the well known Eclipse software which is great. A lightweight editor is called geany. Which needs only a little amount of disc space.
Some expert Linux user will argue, that they need LaTeX otherwise it's not possible to create a well formatted pdf paper which includes bibliographic references. But let us imagine a world without LaTeX. What the user needs is abiword and an additional reference manager. In the reference manager a bibtex file is stored, and the entries can be copied and pasted into the abiword document. The combintation of a lightweight reference manager plus abiword will need less than 30 MB on the harddrive. There is not need to install Lyx, LaTeX, and Computer modern fonts in high resolution.
Clean up the Linux ecosystem
Writing new code is pretty easy. The result is, that hundred of software programs and thousands of Linux distributions are available. Each are maintained by a single or two programmers. The problem with the mess is, that the normal user gets a poor software quality. If the manpower is distributed over lots of small projects, many sourceocde redundant.
The better idea is to focus on small but effective projects. The direction is to reduce the sourcecode to a minimum. A concrete example is to prefer WXwidgets over GTK and prefer abiword over Libreoffice. The resulting ISO image which contains all of the programs is smaller. Most Linux distributions today have a demand of 20 GB on the harddrive. The same functionality can be reached with 10 GB and even with 5 GB for the binary files. From the hardware perspective this is only a minor problem, because most SSD have enough space, but the advantage is located on the developer side.
Do we need the sourcecode in the LaTeX project? Is Java under Linux a good idea? Technically it works great but it's the past. The LaTeX ecosystem was created 40 years ago. The programming languaes used in that time are outdated. The general question is which programming language and which software make sense. What we can say for sure is, that the C/C++ ecosystem makes a lot of sense. It allows to create slim programs which are running fast.
One explanation why the average Linux desktop is so huge is because the programs were created before the advent of the Internet. In the past, the user had no internet access. The result was, that all the programs were needed. This motivated the developers to create large scale operating systems with many programs.