Pondering upon (the illusion of) different distros and its consequences - Thoughts?
I’m not even limiting it to how derivatives (i.e. Linux Mint, Manjaro, Nobara etc.) can completely (or at least by 99%) be realized by ‘Ansibling’ their parent distro (i.e. Arch, Debian Fedora etc).
Because, as it stands, there’s not even a lot of difference between different independent distros. Simply, through Distrobox and/or Nix, I can get whatever package I want from whichever repository I want.
Most of the independent distros even offer multiple channels or release cycles to begin with; i.e Debian with Stable/Testing/Sid, Fedora with Rawhide/‘Fedora’/CentOS Stream/RHEL etc.
So, while traditionally we at least had the package manager and release cycles as clear differentiators, it feels as if the lines have never been as blurry as we find them today.
Thankfully, we still have unique distros; e.g. NixOS, Bedrock etc. But I feel, as a community, we’ve not quite realized how homogeneous the fast majority of our distros can be defined (i.e. DE, release cycle, packages, script for additional configuration). And therefore miss opportunities in working together towards bigger goals instead of working on issues that have simply been caused by the (almost) imaginary lines that continue to divide different communities under false suppositions.
Linux distributions have definitely standardized over the years. You get a kernel, systemd, network manager, Firefox, etc from basically every distro targeting desktops. Most will have different spins for the popular desktop environments as well.
From a purely technical perspective the main difference of distributions today is the package manager. Are you using pacman, apt, dnf, or something else? We know as users that while some of these different package managers have advantages and disadvantages they are all doing the same thing. You can get basically all the equivalent packages on each major distribution. I sometimes feel sad thinking about all the volunteer effort working in parallel, but not together to package the same software using different package managers. In many ways it’s duplicate effort that I wish could be spent in better ways.
Even package managers are beginning to converge. Flatpack is becoming extremely popular and is my current preferred way to add software to my system.
Leaving technicals behind the only major difference I see between distro today is their philosophy on how frequently to update and what to exclude. Does every package get a new update immediately when it’s rolled out upstream like Arch? Are we going to stick to older packages and only apply security/bug fix updates like Debian, or do something in between? Do we want to bend over backwards to make it easy to install Nvidia drivers or tell users we don’t support closed source software? Do we want to make it as easy as possible to install codecs or leave it to the wider community to figure that out on their own?
I don’t think there’s any right or wrong answer. Use what you enjoy!
The philosophies behind the different distros is definitely something I didn’t touch upon earlier. Thank you for mentioning that!
I wonder how different the philosophies are between Arch, Debian Sid, Fedora Rawhide and openSUSE Tumbleweed.