this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I generally don't understand why people go for the smaller ones at all. I guess it's good that someone does to prevent the whole scene being dominated by a single distro, but with some exceptions (e.g. you hate systemd for some reason and really want systemd-less arch, or you have a super niche preferences). For 99% of distros it makes very little difference which one you use, except that you'll have fewer resources at your disposal (fewer packages, fewer stack overflow threads, fewer everything).
ubuntu pushing snap is what pushed me away. i had used it since warty and was a regular contributor in the official forums. i went back to pure debian, and have since added mint and manjaro (yes i know about its history) desktops, and a few dietpi on x64 (no sbc here), two of which run my piholes.
I don't know about it's history, can you enlighten me?
main source is ManjarNo
Doing changes right is a bit hard. With immutable Distros, some changes are easier like adding or removing packages, bur core OS adaptions are harder.
But for example how would you convert regular Ubuntu to
This all gets messy, so people choose small distros
The nature of FOSS suggests (make that extra italic) that the most popular distros should be those that actually work the best. Totally agree that Ubuntu is an outlier, and even that is because of choices Canonical made -- and corporate decisions really aren't typically a part of FOSS.
That said, I truly enjoy smaller distros for hobbyism. I don't necessarily see a use case where they should be chosen over a larger one, except for the really annoying fact that distros with corporate backing will always also tend to get quicker adoption.