this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
79 points (80.6% liked)

Linux

65927 readers
530 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] karlhungus@lemmy.ca 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I am not currently using it but it's always been fine whenever I have. What's broken?

[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

For the last few projects I have been on, it has thrown errors during the install. It usually resolves itself, but the user should never be greeted with "something went wrong" or "error during install".

I guess I could download the latest and play with it for 10 minutes and get some specifics.

[–] karlhungus@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

I don't actually care, but when I have in the past (around 2006 era) it "just worked", while other distros i was using required more hand holding (gentoo, redhat, slackware). I suspect most distros are just fine now a days (using debian now and it seems just fine).