Cybersecurity engineers and pentesters don’t need Kali or Parrot. You don’t need Proxmox to use LXC and KVM. You don’t need OpenMediaVault to have Samba and NFS shares. You don’t need Clonezilla to make use of the OCS toolkit. You don’t need LMDE to have a Debian OS with Cinnamon and nonfree drivers installed, or Endeavour to have Arch with KDE Plasma.
But it’s sure as shit good to have everything packed together and preconfigured by professionals.
Or if not professionals at least someone who knows more about it than yourself.
Absolutely.
Edit, responded to the wrong comment somehow.
Or at least willing to push whatever barely working bullshit they forgot to test.
Clonezilla is more like an app that comes with an OS on a liveCD for convenience, as it’s troublesome to use the very OS you’re cloning.
Yeah its a program that has a minimal OS. Its more about the program than the operating system.
Proxmox does add extended hardware support, as does Kali. Parrot enables necessary repos and kernel modifications for Red and Blue team workflows. I don’t know enough about DEs to speak about the others but those three don’t apply to the meme.
I’m not sure I’d go to the lengths of using OMV just to have a samba share.
Maybe the existence of these distros (appliances) is a sign of the state of Linux.
May the next distro win.
Or do, that guy isn’t your boss. If he is, what are you doing listening to him about non work stuff he seems like a gatekeeper kina guy.
But what if… I took Debian, and disguised it as my own distro? Ho ho ho! Delightfuly devilish, Seymore!
I daily Debian because I realized all of the distros I tried and liked were Debian based. That was 20 years ago.
Daring today, aren’t we
Mmm, systemd clams.
I mean Linux wouldn’t be as it is actually without Hannah Montana Linux and Justin Bieber Linux
They can go ahead and create all they want. I just wont use any of them unless they give me a reason.
Exactly! Nobody has to listen to OP and change plans because OP doesn’t approve! Like you, OP is free to NOT use the product!
Idk, it’s a hobby. There’s no problem with new distros. If they’re good, they take off, if not, it’s going to be a niche project. No issue at all.
It’s more than a hobby. That’s kinda the point.
Choose a distro by the default wallpaper.
In that case uwuntu for life.
By logo openSUSE ftw
I’d say actually a bit of the opposite. Generally speaking we don’t need a new package manager or init system, and better hardware support is almost entirely a kernel concern (one might make an argument that the loose bits of key management and tpm2 tools and authentication agents could be better integrated for “Windows Hello” type function I suppose, but I doubt that’s what the meme had in mind.
Not really needing to reinvent the wheel on those, we got a variety of wheels, sometimes serving different sensibilities, sometimes any difference in capability went away long ago (rpm/dnf v. deb/apt).
The best motivation I can think of at this point is to make specialty distribution that is ‘canned’ toward a specific use case. Even then it’s probably best to be an existing distribution under the covers. I think Proxmox is a good example, it’s just Debian but installer made to just do Proxmox. You want to do automated installation? Just use Debian and then add Proxmox (the official recommendation), because they have no particular insight on automated deployment, so why not just defer to an existing facility?
The biggest conceptual change in packaging has been “waste as much disk as you like duplicating dependencies to avoid conflicting dependencies”, maybe with “use namespace and cgroup isolation to better control app interactions” and we have snap, flatpak, appimage, and nix very well covering the gamut for that concept.
For init, we have the easy to modify sysv init, or the more capable but more inscrutable systemd. I don’t see a whole lot of opportunity between those two sorts of options already.
It’s usually easier to criticize something than to go through the effort of understanding it. Posts like the OP are an example of that.
… And ironically, your post is doing the same thing here with software packaging:
The biggest conceptual change in packaging has been “waste as much disk as you like duplicating dependencies to avoid conflicting dependencies”,
Nobody is perfect, so it’s important to keep an open mind about things, especially when one don’t understand them, and especially² when one thinks they understand them as it’s always possible to be wrong (unless they don’t care about going through life as an ignorant asshole. Plenty of people thrive like that.)
I understand it fine, and it’s not just a packaging phenomonon, all sorts of software developers have stopped trying to have consensus on platform and instead ‘just ship the box’. 99% of the time a python application will demand at least virtualenv. Golang, well, you are just going to staticly build (at least LTO means less unrelated stuff comes along for the ride). Of course docker style packaging is bring the whole distro. I’ll give credit to snap and flatpak that at least allow packaging to have external dependency packages to mitigate it somewhat.
New distros get a lot of crap, but often they are solving a need for someone.
Take Windowmaker Live: ostensibly it’s just Debian + Windowmaker. I have seen comments saying why not just install WM on Debian? By asking that question, it’s clear the asker hasnt tried recently. There is a lot to configure, and there are lots of usability papercuts.
A custom distro allows someone to fix those problems for themself, and share those fixes with others. It’s not fragmentation, it’s just FOSS.
+1, kubuntu was a lot simpler than installing KDE on Ubuntu and still having grub applications
Cat on a table.jpg says:
“I’m going to create a new distro by changing the name of Debian”
I too know how to run
sed -r!
Every project eventually makes their own package manager. Its pretty insane if you stop and think about how routinely the package manager is re-invented.
For real. I don’t mind the million distributions, but can we agree on one single package manager?
Where is that comic about standards now that we need it? The one where they create a new standard that is going to solve all the problems, except for now there is just one more standard??
Edit: https://xkcd.com/927
We don’t even need a new standard. Let’s just settle for one of the existing ones.
I’m okay with this, as long as it’s the one I’m using
And which one is that?
Nix, if it’s not obvious from my other posts
I have to check it out.
Every time someone complains, another package manager is created
the number of package managers went up by 1
There are only two options that fix dependency hell. Nix and Guix
Back in 2000 I started using Linux with RedHat (That’s what they were teaching us in college then.) and got to know RPMs before the automatic package dependency resolution tools. Then I moved to Ubuntu in 2004 and have been using that since, and even had a job where I built custom Linux distros based on Debian where I had to build DEB packages, so I got to know that system pretty well.
But, honestly, if there are better package managers out there I wouldn’t mind changing if it means we all use the same thing.
I’ve broken both Fedora and Ubuntu already, so I had to find better solutions. With NixOS I can roll back to a previous revision easily on boot
How do you break Ubuntu?
Upgrade 22 LTS upgrade to Ubuntu 24 LTS failed and I forgot the upgrade didn’t succeed when I rebooted. Unlike NixOS, it doesn’t roll all the changes back when the upgrade is unsuccessful
Aaah I see. Ok. I can see why Nix appeals so much to you.
As I said, I need to try it out. I’m gonna download it right now and try it in a VM.
Not really
There are only a few mainstream package formats and ultimately you are going to probably be using distro packages or portable formats like Flatpak.
All the different distros are all about the vibe and not a lot else. The Linux kernel remains pretty much the same and we just choose different window dressings.
I suppose we could role it all back to Debian Stable and Slackware I guess. Do we need a “Distro Thanos?” Besides, without all those different distros, how you gonna surf?
So don’t harsh the vibes man.
< Do we need a Distro Thanos? > Ubuntu has enough snaps for all the distros!
The Linux kernel remains pretty much the same
So you’ve never tried the Zen Kernel?
No I haven’t bothered to surf that one up yet. But, if it’s vastly different, then it’s not Linux and not germane to this meme.
Is Linux, called linux-zen on some package managers.
But is different than the LTS Kernel, which is also different than the pre-release kernels, which are also different than the stable kernels.
So idk, “what is” Linux and what’s not, according to you.
Maybe you thinking of GNU Hurd? Or the Darwin kernel?
After doing a quick search, I don’t see enough differences for the Zen kernel to claim it’s so special. The main line kernel has to be a “one size fits all” from servers to gaming and anything in between. Zen is just a recompiled mainline kernel with some chosen optimizations for better specific use cases-- mostly desktop/gaming. Which is nothing I can’t do if I recompile my bog standard Fedora kernel for those optimizations.
I never said it was special, but I’m glad you searched bud!
Hardware support is not really the province of distro, to me. Which makes them even more ridiculous.
Lol no.
