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Kind of. When you hear people say they use a "Debian based" distro they'll be using apt as their package manager. You have 3 main "base" distros/package mamage
by deadbunny 6y ago
Kind of. When you hear people say they use a "Debian based" distro they'll be using apt as their package manager.
You have 3 main "base" distros/package mamagers:
Debian/apt
RHEL/yum/dnf
Arch/pacman/pkgbuild
There are of course many more but these are the overwhelming majority.
This means if I wanted to make my own distro I could do as little as take Debian stable as my upstream, rebuild a few packages with a s/Debian/MyDisro/g and change a few default packages and call it that.
Or I could track a mix of packages from Debian testing and stable.
Or I could decide I prefer to build everything my self but still use apt for my package manager.
This is of course turtles all the way down eg: Mint is based of Ubuntu which is based of Debian.
- cesarb 6y agoJust nitpicking, but the package manager for the Debian family is dpkg, not apt; apt is a layer above dpkg. The same way, the package manager for the RedHat family is rpm; yum and it successor dnf is a layer above rpm.
- xet7 6y agoMint works correctly only with mintupdate. If you do "sudo apt update && sudo apt -y dist-upgrade" then it breaks Mint desktop menu. To fix it, you can install all updates with mintupdate, and then "sudo apt -y install mint-menu --reinstall"