All the different distros are all about the vibe and not a lot else. The Linux kernel remains pretty much the same and we just choose different window dressings.
I suppose we could role it all back to Debian Stable and Slackware I guess. Do we need a “Distro Thanos?” Besides, without all those different distros, how you gonna surf?
So don’t harsh the vibes man.
Actually, create as many distros as you like and can!
Hannah Montana 2: Electric Boogaloo Distro Incoming!!!
I mean, bait aside, creating a new distro with an existing package manager allows you to set up a different set of default packages and even add your own new/updated ones. That’s the value of it there.
Idk, it’s a hobby. There’s no problem with new distros. If they’re good, they take off, if not, it’s going to be a niche project. No issue at all.
Cybersecurity engineers and pentesters don’t need Kali or Parrot. You don’t need Proxmox to use LXC and KVM. You don’t need OpenMediaVault to have Samba and NFS shares. You don’t need Clonezilla to make use of the OCS toolkit. You don’t need LMDE to have a Debian OS with Cinnamon and nonfree drivers installed, or Endeavour to have Arch with KDE Plasma.
But it’s sure as shit good to have everything packed together and preconfigured by professionals.
Proxmox does add extended hardware support, as does Kali. Parrot enables necessary repos and kernel modifications for Red and Blue team workflows. I don’t know enough about DEs to speak about the others but those three don’t apply to the meme.
Or if not professionals at least someone who knows more about it than yourself.
And even if they don’t, they know enough to do it to a level I am happy to not bother doing it myself.
Maybe the existence of these distros (appliances) is a sign of the state of Linux.
May the next distro win.
But what if… I took Debian, and disguised it as my own distro? Ho ho ho! Delightfuly devilish, Seymore!
I daily Debian because I realized all of the distros I tried and liked were Debian based. That was 20 years ago.
Ubuntu, Knoppix and MEPIS? I first used Ubuntu in 2006, but it was still very immature then. I didn’t really know much about any other Debian derivatives.
The other big one that was popular was Mandrake but that was rpm based, and a bit later PClinuxOS which was Mandrake based. I didn’t think Debian derivatives were much of a thing then aside from Ubuntu.
There are at least a couple of distros that are based on Ubuntu. Mint is a popular example. I’d say that based on Ubuntu means it is also a Debian derivative.
They can go ahead and create all they want. I just wont use any of them unless they give me a reason.
We already have NixOS, why anything else?
(Guix is cool too).
A good wiki for it?
https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NixOS_Wiki
Still lacking a bit of information about specific stuff.
Unofficial should have the same information, but sometimes there is a discrepancy.
https://search.nixos.org/options
For any option you might need the name of.
https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options.html
For basically anything else where you just have the implementation documentation
Does it use Systemd? If so, then we need something else.
Derive something from PCLinuxOS please, but with actual anaconda kick-starts.
Uhhh, there are no alternatives to SystemD right now.
While different inits exists and they work just as well as SystemD, there is no replacement for the whole suite of programs.
See PostmarketOS, they ended up adding SystemD because it ends up being either thar or reinventing the wheel.
Imho SystemD gets a lot of hate for no reason at all. (Not saying it is perfect at all).
I miss Pardus… Yali and Kaptan were the best
I wonder how many people genuinely used Pardus for just being Pardus until the Turkish government fucked it up
I knew at least 3, including me. It was the first distro that recognized my wacom tablet and could do adjustments on it
New distros get a lot of crap, but often they are solving a need for someone.
Take Windowmaker Live: ostensibly it’s just Debian + Windowmaker. I have seen comments saying why not just install WM on Debian? By asking that question, it’s clear the asker hasnt tried recently. There is a lot to configure, and there are lots of usability papercuts.
A custom distro allows someone to fix those problems for themself, and share those fixes with others. It’s not fragmentation, it’s just FOSS.
It would help more people to improve the installer for difficult-to-install software rather than creating an entire operating system around that software. Using the entire operating system as an installer is over the top
Don’t know the case for this - but there are absolutely cases where the merger is blocked for some reason, and why not just fix it yourself with a distro? It hurts nobody.
Only 5 distros exist: Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, RHEL/Fedora, and built it yourself.
You listed Debian three times.
I’d say actually a bit of the opposite. Generally speaking we don’t need a new package manager or init system, and better hardware support is almost entirely a kernel concern (one might make an argument that the loose bits of key management and tpm2 tools and authentication agents could be better integrated for “Windows Hello” type function I suppose, but I doubt that’s what the meme had in mind.
Not really needing to reinvent the wheel on those, we got a variety of wheels, sometimes serving different sensibilities, sometimes any difference in capability went away long ago (rpm/dnf v. deb/apt).
The best motivation I can think of at this point is to make specialty distribution that is ‘canned’ toward a specific use case. Even then it’s probably best to be an existing distribution under the covers. I think Proxmox is a good example, it’s just Debian but installer made to just do Proxmox. You want to do automated installation? Just use Debian and then add Proxmox (the official recommendation), because they have no particular insight on automated deployment, so why not just defer to an existing facility?
The biggest conceptual change in packaging has been “waste as much disk as you like duplicating dependencies to avoid conflicting dependencies”, maybe with “use namespace and cgroup isolation to better control app interactions” and we have snap, flatpak, appimage, and nix very well covering the gamut for that concept.
For init, we have the easy to modify sysv init, or the more capable but more inscrutable systemd. I don’t see a whole lot of opportunity between those two sorts of options already.
It’s usually easier to criticize something than to go through the effort of understanding it. Posts like the OP are an example of that.
… And ironically, your post is doing the same thing here with software packaging:
The biggest conceptual change in packaging has been “waste as much disk as you like duplicating dependencies to avoid conflicting dependencies”,
Nobody is perfect, so it’s important to keep an open mind about things, especially when one don’t understand them, and especially² when one thinks they understand them as it’s always possible to be wrong (unless they don’t care about going through life as an ignorant asshole. Plenty of people thrive like that.)
