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.

Actually, create as many distros as you like and can!

I mean, bait aside, creating a new distro with an existing package manager allows you to set up a different set of default packages and even add your own new/updated ones. That's the value of it there.

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.

But what if... I took Debian, and disguised it as my own distro? Ho ho ho! Delightfuly devilish, Seymore!

They can go ahead and create all they want. I just wont use any of them unless they give me a reason.

I mean Linux wouldn't be as it is actually without Hannah Montana Linux and Justin Bieber 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).

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.

Choose a distro by the default wallpaper.

Cat on a table.jpg says:

"I'm going to create a new distro by changing the name of Debian"

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.

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.

All the different distros are all about the vibe and not a lot else. The Linux kernel remains pretty much the same and we just choose different window dressings.

I suppose we could role it all back to Debian Stable and Slackware I guess. Do we need a "Distro Thanos?" Besides, without all those different distros, how you gonna surf?

So don't harsh the vibes man.

FU I won't do what you tell me!

Hardware support is not really the province of distro, to me. Which makes them even more ridiculous.

Or a new based DE, like with new libs and frameworks for making ui

Ah good, so

Honestly I'm kind of excited for the infrastructure as code tools. I think it is only going to get easier to customize a install quickly.

Do you have a minute to talk about GNU Guix?