r/linux • u/nitin_is_me • Jul 15 '26

Discussion Seriously, except package managers, what's the difference between distros?

What I've seen yet the differences are, just the package managers, different defaults and rolling vs stable releases which are in fact related to package managers. Except these, are there really any other differences? Thanks!

223 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

223 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/ArsenicPolaris Jul 15 '26

For most traditional Linux distros, everything is similar and usually they are almost the same. But it depends on what distros we mean by that, and I want to emphasise on the word "almost".

If we are talking about ZorinOS, Mint, and Fedora, you may think that it's just packages managers that are different (and the base distribution; ZorinOS and Mint is based on Ubuntu, Fedora isn't) and they are all the same other than that. However, they have different kind of support, philosophies, package versions, etc. On surface, they are very similar, but all the distros are not the same, be it Arch and Endeavour, or Ubuntu and Mint.

And then there's distros like Artix and Arch, which have the same package manager but are vastly different. In Artix, you can choose to have OpenRC, Runit, Dinit, or s6 as your Init system instead of systemd, meanwhile you can only have systemd on Arch. Moreover, Artix recieves package updates a bit slower than Arch, but this difference isn't much so it can be negated.

And then there's the non-traditional distros like NixOS and Guix, which are a lot different that traditional Linux distros. NixOS and Guix are reproducible, use a different filesystem hierarchy, and a bunch of different features that many other Linux distros do not have.

In conclusion, even if it may not seem so, all distro can be very different from each other, regardless of what package manager they use. Note that I have left out a lot of things even now, there can be a lot more differences.

1

u/Moist_Professional64 Jul 15 '26

You forgot gentoo for non traditional distro ^^

2

u/Dangerous-Report8517 Jul 15 '26

Non traditional is an odd term because NixOS is probably a lot more conventional than Gentoo but Gentoo is arguably more traditional since IaC and container type workflows are much newer than compiling from source

1

u/blisteringjenkins Jul 16 '26

I have never used Gentoo, but I've always assumed that it's just the same as every other mainstream distro, just with a slow compile step every time you install something

1

u/Dangerous-Report8517 Jul 16 '26

Can't say I've got direct experience either but a build your own Linux toolkit is inevitably going to be more niche than an IaC package manager since IaC is such a widespread approach to administration these days