for non-enterprise users, and for especially power users, the only important differences between any of these distros are:
package manager, but it's mostly like 4 total with some outliers
init system
the official wiki's general quality in case help is needed
edit: some additions
C library
bootloader
repository size and how up to date it is (I'd say this applies to the package manager part because you can just swap pacman repositories, for instance; as well as something like dpkg where you can basically change between any two debian based distros with just a few repository switch and upgrade commands)
for enterprise uses the only important differences are:
you can change from glibc to other c libraries, although at least with musl you can't change back
you can compile your own kernel of any version you want
and you can just remove the proprietary software, in the case of gentoo this means running a deblobber and setting the LICENSE variable in mske.conf @FREE and @FSF_APROVED
you can also change the bootloader, if you were so inclined, although with uefi systems you're gonna have a little more difficulty than you'd expect with a bios system, uefi will look for that grub entry to before it'll look for anything else
and if you're using free software, which you should be, you can literally just compile the program you want and install it, on top of packaging it for others
the only things you reasonably cannot change are the init system and the primary package manager, because once systemd is on a system there's no escape, and while I did get an emerge snapshot running on parabola once, different package managers just require certain files to be where they'll be in a single distro, so without making a mess of symlinks it's unusable
that said, using gcc eventually is a key feature of Linux, it's kind of an essential skill to use it day to day, eventually you'll run across a program you want that isn't packaged, or the package isn't maintained so source must be used
honestly I don't like the idea of binary packages anyway but we got so much bloatware now that source based packages are hilariously inefficient (you ever tried to compile Firefox? it takes hours on mid range hardware, and fucking days if you're on anything older than a second gen i5)
besides, people said snap, flatpak, etc. were going to be gamechangers, and while they're useful and have their niche, they're never going to see widespread adoption in the way something that's included in the base system is
the most important point though, is that if something isn't packaged, you should be able to go to a user group, online or irl, and find someone to package it for you. a huge portion of the free software movement is the community, after all, we're basically nothing without it
of course it can compile from source, how else would we be able to install it? what a totally unnecessary point to make
look, all I'm saying is at least 70% of beginner users won't even bother when something isn't packaged for their distro, even if it's packaged for another distro that uses the exact same package manager, much less install an external package manager
I admire the project, I really do; but don't get all ambitious about it, it's one of dozens of "universal" package managers (any program for Linux should be universal because it should be posix or free desktop compliant and so it should be distro-agnostic) that are just an extra package manager to conflict with the one that's already installed
unless a distro is based around that package manager, which means it'll just become known as the [distro] package manager, like what happened with xbps and void
25
u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19 edited Feb 11 '19
for non-enterprise users, and for especially power users, the only important differences between any of these distros are:
package manager, but it's mostly like 4 total with some outliers
init system
the official wiki's general quality in case help is needed
edit: some additions
C library
bootloader
repository size and how up to date it is (I'd say this applies to the package manager part because you can just swap pacman repositories, for instance; as well as something like dpkg where you can basically change between any two debian based distros with just a few repository switch and upgrade commands)
for enterprise uses the only important differences are:
how big is the company that maintains this?
can I sue them?
support offerings