In the early days, when the bandwidth of the install CD was vastly higher than that of my internet connection, I routinely clicked "Everything" in the package selection of the RedHat install CD (yes CD, not DVD). Simpler times.

These days when I set up a Linux machine - I don't do in-place updates; an occasional everything-from-scratch restart helps clear out legacy clutter - between the "update" and the packages I actually use (I have a post-install script for my preferred environment), over a gigabyte gets downloaded.