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.
A lot of distros, I think, are started more due to political/social/psychological reasons, and not fundamental technical reasons, and that's why a lot of them are so similar. Those reasons can be good and legit, but sometimes they are probably wrongheaded (but understandable), like an unwillingness to engage with upstream because that's tedious and frustrating, whereas the technical work of creating another distro with oneself in charge may be more fun.
Also, of course, once a distro is big enough, with a sizable community of developers and users, there's a strong incentive to keep it going, even if it's very similar to another distro. Maybe there used to more of difference in the past, but you're not going to convince a whole community to just shut down and join some other project. And business-run distros will keep going as long as the company is making money there is some business reason to keep doing them.
Thank you for touching upon the human-side of things! I wonder if my original point could be distilled to "Can we, humans, simply act more rational?" 😅.
Traditionally; definitely. But if the purpose of package managers is to acquire packages fit for use with the distro, then the position of alt packaging formats (e.g. Nix) and/or solutions that make use of container technology (e.g. Distrobox) at least provide some food for thought.
Like, if I choose to install Debian (Stable) and openSUSE Leap and then proceed to install all my packages through distro-agnostic ways accessible on both distros (e.g. Flatpak, Brew, Nix etc.), then wouldn't you agree that these systems become remarkably close to one another?
