Something that often gets missed is the difference between packaging conventions between distros.

For example, Debian has Apache httpd packaged as “apache2” and has wrapper scripts for enabling sites. Fedora/RHEL has “httpd” and includes conf.d from the main conf. Arch also has “httpd” but doesn’t have a conf.d out of the box. Of course you can pretty much configue Apache to your heart’s content and have an identical setup between all three distros.

From what I’ve read, Debian tends to patch and change software to fit more into their overall system whereas Fedora and Arch tend to be more upstream.

RPM and Arch both have group packages and metapackages. Debian just has metapackages AFAIK. Debian also has “recommended” and “suggested” levels of soft dependencies, the former which is enabled by default. RPM has the capability for weak dependencies but AFAIK most RPM distros don’t use it. Arch doesn’t have soft/weak dependencies AFAIK.

When you install a new system daemon on Debian, it’s generally enabled and started by default, whereas RPM-based and Arch don’t do that.

When I think of the base of the system I tend to think of some of those more subtle idiosyncrasies that tend to spread around the ecosystems, like Ubuntu and Debian behave quite similarly for instance.

I much prefer Librewolf. They are a little more transparent about it is, an independent, open source repackaging of Firefox with Arkenfox(ish) patches applied to it, rather than an entity which signs up for deals with other businesses.

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would’ve been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn’t take me long to figure out what happened. That’s the story of how I stopped using Windows.

There’s also dotnet (.NET Core) available on most distros which is an open source subset of .NET by Microsoft

See https://fiodar.substack.com/p/differences-between-mono-and-net-core

Last edited 2014-01-12 12:30:18 UTC

Thanks, I wasn’t sure what the situation with Darwin was. Android is definitely more free than iOS, but the spirit of AOSP is dead and many of the old AOSP apps have been discontinued. For example Google no longer maintains a calendar app and so LineageOS maintains its own fork. Google’s proprietary suite is front and centre of a lot of the Android distros except for LineageOS and co.

Android and iOS are walled gardens so they hardly count. Both are mostly proprietary these days with an “open core”. When I think of Linux on the desktop, Linux for daily computing etc. I think of an experience that is interoperable, FOSS and respects my digital rights.