From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
There are two kinds of distros: ones that start with another distro and mod it, and ones that start with the original open source code and package it. I tend to like the second kind because they are in control of their timetable and destiny and because the project has, by necessity, more expertise. Often they also have more users, which is a good thing (more testing, more contributors). Ubuntu is an exception. Although it is derived from debian, it has way more users, mind share, and perhaps engineers. I'm not sure why Ubuntu doesn't cut the tie. Its innovations have just as often been bad as good. I do like their two update and support cycles (every six months and every two years). It is the default distro for many software projects. I've not used debian much. I very much respect the project's structure and goals. I have been unhappy with its slow pace of package bug fixes and updates -- their freezes don't seem to match the nature of software change these days. Backporting fixes seems like the wrong approach once change gets high-volume. Lennart seems to thrive with debian, and his opinion carries a lot of weight with me. I like Fedora. Mostly. It has been very good for my uses. I wish that there were a more stable version for some of my systems. There's too much of a discontinuity between RHEL (and clones) and Fedora. It does adopt new versions of packages quite quickly. Fedora updates come fast and furious. I like the open source purity of Fedora but sometimes that is uncomfortable -- much less these days. I used to use CentOS for some systems but the version update process was horrible: the steps were a lot larger and I tended to put them off too long. The drama of Red Hat fighting cloners and damaging users was too much for me. I use Android or ChromeOS, mostly because I don't really have a choice on phones and tablets. They are Linux distros. You can even install Android on a PC. I don't like Snaps or Flatpaks. For two reasons: library bugs should be fixed in one package, not dozens; library resources should be expended once, not dozens of times. The time when Flatpak's are justified is for really big things shared by many distros. Think of Firefox. The individual distros probably add no value to it -- too complex. The Firefox developers probably want to handle bug reports without needing to have every distro at hand. The extra cost of duplicated libraries is probably a minor percentage of the resources used by FireFox. Bonus: perhaps whole-program optimization can make a difference (Link Time Optimization is a start). Clear Linux, as I understand it (not necessarily accurate), was a showcase for optimizations, both micro (using particular Intel instruction set additions, compiling with Intel-centric optimizations) and macro (getting rid of cruft that irritated the developers). The Wikipedia article is probably more useful than my opinion. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Linux_OS>. Statelessness is a nice goal. I don't know how packaging stacks would play out in my world. Personally, I don't find it rewarding to switch distros. I have enough other challenges. I will do it when my current distro become sufficiently uncomfortable. I admit that the last time I switched was when RHL split into RHEL and Fedora Core.