What are the differences between the 'base' of various Linux distributions?
What are the differences between the 'base' of various Linux distributions?
I've been using linux desktop for a year or so now. One noteable thing i keep seeing is that one person will say I dont like XYZ distrobution because of its base. But I am still a little unsure what is meant by it. I am assuming the main difference between each base is the choice of package management(?). But what other factors/aspects that are important for the average user to know about each 'base'? This is probably quite a broad question to a rather technical answer, but appriciate any answers, and i'll try my best to understand and read up :)
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When they say base, they're talking about the distro it's built off of(Debian, arch, slack, fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). As an example, Mint is built on the Ubuntu base, Bunsen is built on Debian, etc. These are often called flavors as they're not considered distros but rather something built on top of a distro.
The major visible differences in distros are the package managers and tools provided for it but they also have different goals. Debian aims for rock solid stability, fedora puts FOSS first, Arch is designed to take up your free time by making you build everything from scratch and pointing you to a wiki when you're stuck (I kid).
The flavors then customize the experience, usually muddying the distro goals in the process. For instance, someone might take a fedora base then pack it full of proprietary software and release it.
I wouldn't say what you use is irrelevant but you can truly make every base look and perform the same if you do some work. People that don't like a particular base usually don't want to do that work, they want to use it. I'm one of those people. Where I used to love tinkering in Linux, now I just want to get it up and running so I can do my stuff on it.
Great comment, but something I'd disagree on:
As an example, Mint is built on the Ubuntu base, Bunsen is built on Debian, etc. These are often called flavors as they're not considered distros but rather something built on top of a distro.
From my understanding, those would generally still be referred to as distros in their own right. I've always understood a flavour to be a variant of a specific distro. For example, kubuntu is the KDE flavour of Ubuntu.
Correct, they are derivative distributions.
Arch is designed to take up your free time by making you build everything from scratch
That's a weird take, arch provides repositories ootb and is meant to be used with pacman, you're maybe confusing with gentoo?
(I kid)
No, you don't
Debian aims for rock solid stability
To be clear, Debian "stability" refers to "unchanging packages", not "doesn't crash." Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it's not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).
So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That's not what I'd consider "stable" but rather "consistent"
Well, in fairness, I didn't name it.
You're right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and "unchanging" is a valid one of them.
It's just that every where else I've seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. "Can't be knocked over" sort of stability. And everyone I've ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what "stable" meant to Debian. but it doesn't. It just means "versions won't change so you won't have version compatibility issues, but you'll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn't even up to date when this version released, but at least you don't have to think about the compatibility issues!"
I agree. I used Debian for a very long time but found a move to Sid for fresh packages to be a frustrating experience so I just moved to an ubu based system.