Few like bloatware. Almost every operating system in the world comes with what is necessary to work and other things that we might never use, not to mention what is added by agreements with some companies. For this reason there are operating systems like Manjaro that offer a "minimal" ISO, and for the same reason Ubuntu offers the "minimal installation". Xubuntu It intends to go a little further than its older brother, and to do so it will do something similar to what other operating systems do.
So what announced Steve Langasek in an email with which he intends to officially report all this. The most striking thing is the weight that this image will have: it will fit on a CD. Now, it must be made clear that this minimal image it will have just enough to work with Xubuntu and its graphical environment; Almost anything you want will have to be installed on your own, but for those who prefer to have only what they are going to use.
Xubuntu's new minimal image will fit on a CD
This parallels the existing minimal installation goals of the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server images to provide a smaller installation footprint with no applications that developers want to install as part of the default experience, but are not essential. Unlike Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server, it ships as a separate image to support smaller installation media (specifically, it's designed to fit on a classic CD-ROM).
As Langasek points out, this image will be a new option different from what is offered now, that although it is true that an installation is achieved with less software, it is also true that to achieve it you have to download the entire image that is usually over 2GB.
Xubuntu 23.04 will arrive in April with Linux 6.2, the base news of Ubuntu and the latest version of Xfce.
Oh. The reason is accepted.
Maybe one day they will go further and prepare a smaller image (as Debian has been today and for years) that only allows the system to be installed and in the process installs XFCE via the internet.