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.
As a community, I do think we get hungup on distros. Most of them, as you mentioned, are just different defaults of the same packages.
But at the maintainer level, I do think theres a lot of work distributions do at making sure the software they choose as defaults are up to date, secure, and work with one another. I dont enounter it often, but relying on maintainers to prevent mismatched depencies ending up in the day-to-day linux user has to be worth something. And every set of defaults needs that level of assurance, I would think. Im not a maintainer, I could be off here.
Hats off for the efforts provided by maintainers. But I feel as if that potential should be better utilized (in part) to achieve greater goals.