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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Okay, there will be people disagreeing with me, but I can’t let a new user be misled by us nerds talking distros all day.

    So, you want to choose a distro because you expect it to do things differently than your current one? Thing is: Ultimately, they (mostly) don’t differ that much, really. There are extremely few things one distro can do that you cannot do in any other distro. Yes, some files will be in different places, they might use special versions for some packages (which often can be overridden) or use older and more stable versions of stuff (Debian). Yet, in the end, they are all the same OS. They all use the same window managers, the same kernels, the same drivers (mostly), the same logic behind many things. Another distro only feels really different, when you know a lot about the ins and outs of Linux systems. If you don’t, the difference will often be that you have to type either “pacman” or “apt”, or either change /etc/program.conf or /etc/program.d/foo.conf.

    Play with the distro you already have and like. You ain’t missing anything. Just don’t get the wrong idea that Distros are like windows: monolithic monsters that can’t be really changed. Like mint but want Gnome as window manager? Go for it. Dislike the way the standard terminal software does colors? Get another one. Don’t like how Program X does some GUI thing? There will almost always an alternative that just plugs into your system exactly as the preinstalled one did.

    A distribution is basically just a pre-selection of packages that can be changed at will. Hell, you could in theory get pacman on Debian or Apt on Arch. I don’t know why you’d want to, but in theory you could.

    Don’t waste your time reinstalling your machine. Play with the things you already have!