Hey guys! Trying to understand what developers actually do to create a yet another distro, or what are the differences between existing distros. Lets say we have ubuntu and fedora. What are the differences? Excluding DE, Installer, theme, installed packages/libs and package manager. They both are FHS compliant, both running systemd what else?

Just wondering if there could be a way to “simulate”, lets say ubuntu on fedora. For example providing every program that should be present on ubuntu in fedora. Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora? Im not gonna do that though, just curious about this question.

Thank you!

  • @[email protected]English
    8•7 months ago

    The differences between distros are the things you mentioned. They all use the Linux kernel, so the differences are in the DE, installer, theme, default packages, and package manager. These changes come about from design choices: rolling vs versioned releases, stability goals, FOSS vs proprietary packages/repositories, things like systemd vs alternatives, and overall goals/use cases (lightweight, server, etc).

    A distro can be as little as a theme change. The famous Hannah Montana Linux is KUbuntu with a custom theme, icon pack, and Hannah Montana as the background.

    https://linuxreviews.org/Hannah_Montana_Linux

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•7 months ago

      So basically if i have all Voidlinux’s programs installed on NixOS, i can have some decent amount of packages (that are not heavily depending on init systems or some other non trivial stuff) from Void repos running on NixOS?

      • Dotdev
        1•7 months ago

        I wouldn’t compare void and nix since both of them follow very different approaches. Void is more like a traditional distro while nixos on the other hand uses configurations for setup.

        And no you can’t use void on nix os as said above. Hannah Montana linux and kubuntu uses Ubuntu as the base that’s what he meant.

        • @[email protected]OP
          0•7 months ago

          Im not talking about comparing these distros, nor using void on NixOS. Im asking if i had all packages that are preinstalled on void, present on NixOS as well. Would i be able to run some packages from void linux repos on NixOS? If i make nix derivation with package from void repo and install it, would it work?

          Looks like the answer is “Yes”, but im not sure.

          • Dotdev
            1•7 months ago

            If the same void package exists in the nix os repo then sure. You can’t use a void package in nix os is the thing I would like to point out other than using distrobox.