3 ms·

> (and these days you don’t even see that much variety in Linux any more either) I beg to differ! While I do see that there are a a handful of very popular dis

> (and these days you don’t even see that much variety in Linux any more either) I beg to differ! While I do see that there are a a handful of very popular distros, there are tons more out there! Spend a few minutes poking around DistroWatch[0] and see if you don't agree. 0. https://distrowatch.com/ https://distrowatch.com/

pushpop 8y ago
I'm not on about quantity of distros, I'm on about variety. A thousand Ubuntu derivatives doesn't add much variation. systemd hasn't helped much here either because there used to be a lot of variety in how distro's would implement sysv. There even used to be distros that rolled their own file system hierarchy. Some might see the grand unification a good thing for interoperability and developers - and I don't disagree with them. But it was fun looking at the different ways different distros would solve the same problem. Whereas now the biggest difference between a lot of distros is a great deal more superficial.
- fooblat 8y ago
  I agree that the majority of distros are based on debian/ubuntu/fedora but there are still some significantly different ones out there. The most interesting/useful of these for me lately has been void linux[0]. It is based around runit (instead of systemd) and has a very nice native package manager as well. 0. https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/
  - pushpop 8y ago
    I'm not saying there isn't still some distinct ones out there. I'm saying in there is less variety than there used to be. variety is the key description I used. Sure there are few outliers still but the rest are just systemd + (apt|rpm) and there this really the same as what Linux was like 20 years ago where even Debian and Redhat were distinctly different from one another. Even Arch has come into the fold somewhat over the years.

3 ms·

> (and these days you don’t even see that much variety in Linux any more either) I beg to differ! While I do see that there are a a handful of very popular dis

by fooblat 8y ago

pushpop 8y ago
I'm not on about quantity of distros, I'm on about variety. A thousand Ubuntu derivatives doesn't add much variation. systemd hasn't helped much here either because there used to be a lot of variety in how distro's would implement sysv. There even used to be distros that rolled their own file system hierarchy. Some might see the grand unification a good thing for interoperability and developers - and I don't disagree with them. But it was fun looking at the different ways different distros would solve the same problem. Whereas now the biggest difference between a lot of distros is a great deal more superficial.
- fooblat 8y ago
  I agree that the majority of distros are based on debian/ubuntu/fedora but there are still some significantly different ones out there. The most interesting/useful of these for me lately has been void linux[0]. It is based around runit (instead of systemd) and has a very nice native package manager as well. 0. https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/
  - pushpop 8y ago
    I'm not saying there isn't still some distinct ones out there. I'm saying in there is less variety than there used to be. variety is the key description I used. Sure there are few outliers still but the rest are just systemd + (apt|rpm) and there this really the same as what Linux was like 20 years ago where even Debian and Redhat were distinctly different from one another. Even Arch has come into the fold somewhat over the years.