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Why choice of Linux distribution matters (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago (9 children)

But you can. It's not my argumentation, but the argumentation is, that you have access to any part of the system and can change everything. What is the reason that you cannot turn NixOS into Arch? Note, I am not the one claiming this and I don't even know if this is true. I just don't have the answer to it why this isn't possible.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    the argumentation is, that you have access to any part of the system and can change everything. What is the reason that you cannot turn NixOS into Arch?

    Because you don't have access to any part of the system. Again, nobody is saying you can change everything. NixOS is immutable meaning that is locked down read-only and only the Nix daemon has access to write. It's a matter of declarative vs imperative configuration schema. It's how vs what. In NixOS, you tell the system what you want done. In Arch, you tell the system how to do it.

    So, you can't change any distro into any other distro, but the likelihood of two distros having any meaningful difference is low to the point of being pointless to ask.

    As another user already stated, the main reason distros don't matter is analysis paralysis. Most of the users asking for thoughts between distros are effectively asking which of two duplicates is better. Say you've narrowed the distros you want to use to Debian and Kali, what is the difference between them if you just want to play games? There isn't one. You can run proton on Kali just as easy as Debian (you'd even be hitting the same repo likely).

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    Because you don’t have access to any part of the system. Again, nobody is saying you can change everything.

    But you have! And as said, there are people saying exactly that. BTW I actually understand the difference between NixOS and Arch. I mean you can actually change anything on NixOS and slowly transform it into a regular distribution without what it makes to be a Nix system. I mean if you have root rights on the system, then you could remove what it makes a NixOS and install a different package manager, set it sources up from Arch repositories in example and so fort.

    I don't know if everything can be done like that, but theoretically there is no limit in access to any file and data on a Linux distribution. If you have root access. In example, what in particular cannot be changed in NixOS?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Ok, this is getting into macro scale now. They use entirely different filesystems, boot sequences, package databases, and low-level C libraries. So, in that car analogy what you are describing would effectively be changing out 1 or a few parts at a time and iterating over that until no original part exists and then saying you turned a car into a truck because you kept the car radio the same.

    Maybe this is a matter of perspective, but at that point I would say you didn't turn a car into a truck, you just built a truck.

    EDIT: I would say most people's constraint on being able / not able to convert distros is "within reason". Without that, we might as well just talk about kernel versions because that's ultimately what Linux is not the DEs and package managers and etc,etc.

    To your original point that you can't turn one distro into another (which you seem to now disagree with), you can but not always "within reason".

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    Yes, that's the argument its being made.

    I'm NOT (edit: forgot the NOT, lol) the one claiming that, just reiterating whats being said. Because I don't know and want to find it out with discussions. I think it is ridiculous, and don't think anyone should do that. But technically it can be done, seemingly.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I've been thinking more and more about this (the NixOS to Arch) and comments saying "that should be easy".

    Dynamic linking creates a catch 22 to all of this.

    You have to do the majority of steps live and can't reboot. NixOS doesn't follow FHS, but Arch bootstrapping requires that. If you force-create those directories and try to bootstrap Arch over a live NixOS instance, the binaries you compile will instantly break because they won't be able to find the dynamic linker (ld-linux) or standard C libraries (glibc) in the locations they expect.

    At some point you are going to be using Nix's development tools to build out pacman. To get around the previous issues you would drop to a nix-shell to build the environment (which is one really good use of NixOS in general), but then you'd segfault as soon as you tried to use it outside the environment.

    Even with the pacman binary present as soon as you rug pull glibc from memory, since pacman is needing the host's instance of that, you'd have a kernel panic.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I was never this specific, but this kind of thought process is what I always had and countered with. I don't think there is evidence this can be done to a degree, to be able to say that the distribution doesn't matter. I don't buy that, just to be clear. Maybe people claiming this are thinking of similar distributions, like Ubuntu to Debian and never had atomic distributions in mind or something wacky as NixOS.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Going back to what the other user mentioned, in the context of how people ask the question, I don't think distro matters. You have new users asking "What is a good distro for playing games? Bazzite or CachyOS?" Both. It doesn't matter, they will play the same.

    Kali Linux would also be a completely correct answer to that question. Even back in the day I had Backtrack 5 running Dragon Age 2. And for security testing, what is the best distro? The one that you installed your tools to. Distro A has 200 sec tools pre-installed, Distro B has 400 sec tools pre-installed, but both have the same 10 tools you actively use so they are the same. Arguably neither are the best because that means there is 190 and 390 tools present that are just bloatware.

    So, hopefully you can understand how arbitrary the choice in distro actually is.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Out of all the distros, NixOS would actually be the easiest to convert to Arch or some other distro. Other than /etc, it doesn't use the standard FHS paths so you're free to use some other package manager to install whatever you want under /bin, /lib, /usr, et cetera.

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