I see often people say that the distro you are using doesn’t matter. One can turn any distro into another. And I do not agree with that. If that was true, why do we even have so many distributions? I always said, if distros don’t matter…
- … why distro hop?
- … why don’t you use Ubuntu then?
- … why don’t you recommend Archlinux to a newcomer?
- … why don’t you use Kali Linux as a server?
- … why don’t you use Batocera or SteamOS as your daily driver?
- … why do you trust a community distro more than a corporate distro? (or vice versa)
I don’t think that distros only matter to newcomers. Maybe it matters for experienced users even more.
Ok, this is getting into macro scale now. They use entirely different filesystems, boot sequences, package databases, and low-level C libraries. So, in that car analogy what you are describing would effectively be changing out 1 or a few parts at a time and iterating over that until no original part exists and then saying you turned a car into a truck because you kept the car radio the same.
Maybe this is a matter of perspective, but at that point I would say you didn’t turn a car into a truck, you just built a truck.
EDIT: I would say most people’s constraint on being able / not able to convert distros is “within reason”. Without that, we might as well just talk about kernel versions because that’s ultimately what Linux is not the DEs and package managers and etc,etc.
To your original point that you can’t turn one distro into another (which you seem to now disagree with), you can but not always “within reason”.
Yes, that’s the argument its being made.
I’m NOT (edit: forgot the NOT, lol) the one claiming that, just reiterating whats being said. Because I don’t know and want to find it out with discussions. I think it is ridiculous, and don’t think anyone should do that. But technically it can be done, seemingly.
I’ve been thinking more and more about this (the NixOS to Arch) and comments saying “that should be easy”.
Dynamic linking creates a catch 22 to all of this.
You have to do the majority of steps live and can’t reboot. NixOS doesn’t follow FHS, but Arch bootstrapping requires that. If you force-create those directories and try to bootstrap Arch over a live NixOS instance, the binaries you compile will instantly break because they won’t be able to find the dynamic linker (ld-linux) or standard C libraries (glibc) in the locations they expect.
At some point you are going to be using Nix’s development tools to build out pacman. To get around the previous issues you would drop to a nix-shell to build the environment (which is one really good use of NixOS in general), but then you’d segfault as soon as you tried to use it outside the environment.
Even with the pacman binary present as soon as you rug pull glibc from memory, since pacman is needing the host’s instance of that, you’d have a kernel panic.
I was never this specific, but this kind of thought process is what I always had and countered with. I don’t think there is evidence this can be done to a degree, to be able to say that the distribution doesn’t matter. I don’t buy that, just to be clear. Maybe people claiming this are thinking of similar distributions, like Ubuntu to Debian and never had atomic distributions in mind or something wacky as NixOS.