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While I get your point, you are missing a big player: NixOS. It is not based on any of those distros, it is not similar to any of those distros, and it offers s

While I get your point, you are missing a big player: NixOS. It is not based on any of those distros, it is not similar to any of those distros, and it offers significantly more than just a package set and wallpapers. My NixOS install is immutable, so I can trivially roll back any changes to my system/software/configs. It has a lockfile so the versions of all of my software do not change _at all_ unless I tell it to. That lockfile doesn't just extend to the software I have installed but all the software that is used to build the software on my machine, so I can perfectly reproduce the same system with the same version of software compiled by the same exact versions of the compilers. On NixOS you can trivially have many versions of any software or library installed on your system and use them all (for example, foo can depend on python 3.7.2, bar can depend on python 2.7.1, and baz can depend on python 3.14. They can all happily live on my machine. You can even have multiple copies of the same version of python but compiled with different flags if you want. On arch linux your only option for python right now is 3.14.2.) On NixOS I can trivially run 1 command and generate a bootable ISO that has exactly the same software and configs that I have installed on my computer. This has been rather nice for repair/debugging USBs and for running virtual machines off the ISOs. You're also missing: - Gentoo (not based on any of the distros you listed) - Chimera Linux which brings in the FreeBSD userland, musl libc, and Dinit - Suse Linux (a pop music video cover band that also made some Linux distros. They were pretty big in the live kernel patching ("Don't reboot it just patch!"). Not based on any of the distros you listed)

hollerith 9mo ago
I'm not trying to defend the comment you are replying to, but if we're going to bring up NixOS in a discussion that started out being about security, I have to point out that even by the low standards of Linux distros, NixOS's security is bad. For example, NixOS famously didn't require package maintainers to sign the artifacts they upload to NixOS's servers. (They still might not: it has been a year or two since I inquired.) The NixOS project considered it more important to make it easy for people to start maintaining NixOS packages (so that users would have a large selection of packages to choose from) than to have any kind of supply-chain integrity. Maintaining a distro that is even remotely secure is a great deal of work, and the people that are willing to put in that work don't pick a distro to base their work on at random: they strongly tend to base their work on the distros that already have a pretty good security story, so for example the relatively new distro "Secureblue" is based on Fedora Atomic Desktop because Fedora already had for many years a pretty good security story. (E.g., it and RHEL are the only distros that use selinux in any real way.) The point is that it is probably going to be hard for NixOS to improve its security much because most Linux maintainers either do not care about security much or do not even realize that the security of all Linux distros is lacking (compared to ChromeOS, MacOS, iOS or Android) The small fraction of Linux maintainers willing to work on improving security and aware of the immensity of the task naturally tend to direct their work toward a distro and an ecosystem (e.g., Qubes, Kicksecure, Fedora or Debian) that has already been the target of much previous security-improving effort.

hollerith 9mo ago

I'm not trying to defend the comment you are replying to, but if we're going to bring up NixOS in a discussion that started out being about security, I have to point out that even by the low standards of Linux distros, NixOS's security is bad. For example, NixOS famously didn't require package maintainers to sign the artifacts they upload to NixOS's servers. (They still might not: it has been a year or two since I inquired.) The NixOS project considered it more important to make it easy for people to start maintaining NixOS packages (so that users would have a large selection of packages to choose from) than to have any kind of supply-chain integrity. Maintaining a distro that is even remotely secure is a great deal of work, and the people that are willing to put in that work don't pick a distro to base their work on at random: they strongly tend to base their work on the distros that already have a pretty good security story, so for example the relatively new distro "Secureblue" is based on Fedora Atomic Desktop because Fedora already had for many years a pretty good security story. (E.g., it and RHEL are the only distros that use selinux in any real way.) The point is that it is probably going to be hard for NixOS to improve its security much because most Linux maintainers either do not care about security much or do not even realize that the security of all Linux distros is lacking (compared to ChromeOS, MacOS, iOS or Android) The small fraction of Linux maintainers willing to work on improving security and aware of the immensity of the task naturally tend to direct their work toward a distro and an ecosystem (e.g., Qubes, Kicksecure, Fedora or Debian) that has already been the target of much previous security-improving effort.