i gave Fedora a try, i got to say they brought bloated software to a new level. 4 discs??? to install XP on had one disc.
now kubuntu is nice and small, that's a good distro.
I wouldn't say "bloated." The reason for this is that XP comes with the OS. That's it. FC4 comes with the OS, several WMs, Apache, GIMP, Office, a Quicken-like application, Network utilities, sound utilities, disc-burning utilities, multiple browsers, programming languages and IDEs (Off the top of my head, I can count 4-5 languages and 3 IDEs), multiple text editors, etc.
The actual OS is smaller than XP and is only a fraction of the install.
FC4 is meant to be a General Purpose distro. That means it's more than a base OS--it includes all the software most people would want to use, plus a good selection of software that would appeal to a broad cross-section of users.
There are other distros that target other users--DSL, for instance, only contains a small OS and a couple of browsers. It uses the same OS as FC4, but it weighs in at under 50MB.
The number of disks is a poor yardstick to measure by because 1) most people will not install everything 2) many people do not compile their own software and do not need to install the dev libraries 3) most people are not going to install all of the language and localization files.
I could go on, but you get the point. There are a lot of files that are optional during install. A simple Fedora workstation setup is not installing 4 full disks of files.