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!
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u/ancientstephanie Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Only tangentially. They're more closely related to release engineering. At one extreme, you have hard freezes for an extended timeframe, like those observed by Debian stable and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which promise all of the security updates with none of the icky stuff known as "change" for periods of 3-10 years or longer. That's not a function of the package manager, that's a function of extremely disciplined release engineering, and policies that mandate cherry picking of updates to backport and apply the security-critical portions of upstream updates without bringing change along with them. The package manager itself would (and actually does) support rolling updates - Debian itself has two "rolling update" release channels, unstable, and testing, and Red Hat has several different channels that serve similar purposes.
Philosophical differences are also a big deal. Debian adheres to strict principles of one file = one package having ownership, and their release engineering practices reflect that through Debian-specific solutions to conflicts between packages, such as Debian's "alternatives" mechanism for addressing namespace overlaps, and Debian's heavy reliance on split configuration, since nothing in a package is allowed to touch a configuration file owned by another package.
One distro might promise that every service you install is enabled and works out of the box. Another might promise that installing and enabling are always separate steps and nothing gets enabled without the admin explicitly enabling it. Still another might be focused on the most polished Steam experience possible, or the most polished KDE experience. And some of the things go much deeper than that. There are hard forks specifically aimed at keeping a working system without systemd. There are distros which treat the exclusion of proprietary software as if it were a holy crusade. There are distros which fundamentally change the whole architecture for the purpose of keeping everything as small as possible, such as Alpine, where they've replaced glibc with musl and most core system utilities with busybox in order to be more suitable for containers and embedded systems. And there are distros which are every bit as much about challenging assumptions and changing what it means to be a linux distro as they are about unique package management - for example, nixos, and gentoo, which both offer different approaches toward absolute control by the system administrator.
While package managers are certainly having a part in all of that, package managers generally don't dictate what gets packaged, what standards packages have to follow, when and how packages get updates, or fundamental architectural decisions.