I see often people say that the distro you are using doesn’t matter. One can turn any distro into another. And I do not agree with that. If that was true, why do we even have so many distributions? I always said, if distros don’t matter…

  • … why distro hop?
  • … why don’t you use Ubuntu then?
  • … why don’t you recommend Archlinux to a newcomer?
  • … why don’t you use Kali Linux as a server?
  • … why don’t you use Batocera or SteamOS as your daily driver?
  • … why do you trust a community distro more than a corporate distro? (or vice versa)

I don’t think that distros only matter to newcomers. Maybe it matters for experienced users even more.

      • EchoDelta_9@programming.dev
        1·
        3 hours ago

        FWIW, uBlue has been brewing for almost three years now for their CLI stuff: see this issue tracker and this blogpost from Bluefin’s creator.

        The distrobox workflow overall has mostly been superseded by better alternatives[1]. Though, for completeness’ sake, openSUSE’s atomic offering continues to heavily rely on Distrobox. But, in their defense, I think their atomic offerings are simply better[2] suited for it.

        1. There’s sysext with its (WIP) manager, Brew Tap to tap into homebrew casks and some peeps even use coldbrew. And last, but definitely not least, nix support has improved over the years. And if you just want to use dnf, RakuOS’ innovative hybrid design allows just that; an image-based core you can’t touch (like the other ‘immutables’), but dnf works and is applied through a persistent overlay. ↩︎

        2. Fedora’s container images are tied to its major release versions. Hence, every 7-13 months you’re required to set them up from scratch if you’d like to continue using them 😅. Even if this process can be streamlined, it’s IMO very cumbersome regardless. In openSUSE’s case, the containers are based on Tumbleweed. Which, has a rolling release cadence. Hence, it was meant to be used indefinitely. ↩︎

        • IratePirate@feddit.org
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up! I’ve saved it for later when I get to drill down on this.

          It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.