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.
And even if they don’t, they know enough to do it to a level I am happy to not bother doing it myself.
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.
Actually, create as many distros as you like and can!
Hannah Montana 2: Electric Boogaloo Distro Incoming!!!
featuring Dante from Devil May Cry!
And Knuckles!
Except for distros like Apartheid Linux … maybe uncreate those.
Musk has a distro???
Don’t give him any ideas…
“Distro of Gaming Excellence”
- Comes with a Fiverr account for paying someone else to level up your character!
- Built-in GrokAI to provide tips on what to say in game chat. “Hello, fellow gaming kids.”
- Preconfigured X (Twitter) + OBS Studio, so your followers can watch your livestream fail! Repeatedly!
I don’t want to search this… Wth is it?
nazi distro
How? Why? I can’t even
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.
Ubuntu, Knoppix and MEPIS? I first used Ubuntu in 2006, but it was still very immature then. I didn’t really know much about any other Debian derivatives.
The other big one that was popular was Mandrake but that was rpm based, and a bit later PClinuxOS which was Mandrake based. I didn’t think Debian derivatives were much of a thing then aside from Ubuntu.
There are at least a couple of distros that are based on Ubuntu. Mint is a popular example. I’d say that based on Ubuntu means it is also a Debian derivative.
Mint didn’t really see any sort of popularity until around 2010 as I remember.
I’m aware it’s initial release was earlier (surprised it was exist in 06!), but the reality of those times is that Ubuntu was still building itself up let alone Mint getting traction yet.
Daring today, aren’t we
Mmm, systemd clams.
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.
They can go ahead and create all they want. I just wont use any of them unless they give me a reason.
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.
I mean Linux wouldn’t be as it is actually without Hannah Montana Linux and Justin Bieber Linux
I patiently await Christopher Walken Linux.
Nah. Push them out like rabbits do with their babies. Let them fight and see which ones prevail!
We already have NixOS, why anything else?
(Guix is cool too).
A good wiki for it?
https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NixOS_Wiki
Still lacking a bit of information about specific stuff.
Unofficial should have the same information, but sometimes there is a discrepancy.
https://search.nixos.org/options
For any option you might need the name of.
https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options.html
For basically anything else where you just have the implementation documentation
Does it use Systemd? If so, then we need something else.
Derive something from PCLinuxOS please, but with actual anaconda kick-starts.
Uhhh, there are no alternatives to SystemD right now.
While different inits exists and they work just as well as SystemD, there is no replacement for the whole suite of programs.
See PostmarketOS, they ended up adding SystemD because it ends up being either thar or reinventing the wheel.
Imho SystemD gets a lot of hate for no reason at all. (Not saying it is perfect at all).
Doesn’t have too! You can just use nix as a package manager and install it to whatever distro you choose 😉
The services it installs are systemd, though
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.
It would help more people to improve the installer for difficult-to-install software rather than creating an entire operating system around that software. Using the entire operating system as an installer is over the top
You’re both right
Yeah I’m reading what they said and that kind of solution wouldn’t be acceptable in any industry…
Imagine if you wanted to add AC to your central heating system and they told you they need to add a second furnace in parallel to the one you already have because it’s possible to add AC to your current setup, but it’s very complicated to do so…
Maybe a script or deployment tool config would suffice
Maybe one you could just download and pipe to bash. /s
ansible-pull and kickstart was what I had in mind
I figured, I was playing on the number of github repos with instructions for curl pipe bash combos.
You’re re-inventing the Nix tool which is exactly a script that sets up all the programs and services you want to install
Except no one really uses Nix outside of Nix OS. It is slow and complicated for little reason.
Just use Ansible and an answers file
Then how come we have more packages than the AUR?
And don’t say it’s because we packaged Python and Haskell stuff since we have more non-unique packages too
Isn’t it just that though?
If you improve the installer to the point it can install any combination of software together (including incompatible versions of deps) you end up with NixOS again
Much like how crustaceans have repeatedly evolved into pseudo-crabs, Linux distros tend to evolve into pseudo-nix
+1, kubuntu was a lot simpler than installing KDE on Ubuntu and still having grub applications
Choose a distro by the default wallpaper.
In that case uwuntu for life.
By logo openSUSE ftw
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!
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.
i like novel implementations of these things, it’s the reason why linux as it is today is so good, people were willing to try novel methods of package management, and the repo worked great.
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.
Flatpak it is.
I don’t know if Flatpak can cover all the scenarios. It seems to be mostly for Desktop apps. I know Ubuntu was able to have system tools installed with Snaps though. However, having apps installed with their dependencies in one package is neat, but it takes a ton more in storage.
Flatpak is a great extra layer to have on top of a regular package manager, but I wouldn’t use it as a sole package management system.
I think an immutable system package manager like Nix is perfect to supplement Flatpak.
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.
