Imagine you wake up and your distro just doesn’t exist anymore. Never did. Like some kind of For All Mankind alternate history situation.
The major root distros: Debian, Red Hat (Fedora), Arch, SUSE (openSUSE), etc.
Subtract the root distro your favourite is based on, or if you’re already on a root distro, subtract that one. Debian users and everyone on a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu, MX, Kali, Debian never existed. Arch and Manjaro users, Arch never existed. You get the idea.
Where do you end up instead, and why?
For me, Debian is my favorite distro. If it never existed, that wipes out pretty much everything I’ve ever loved because on desktop, most distros I’ve spent real time with are Debian-based. Ubuntu, is also Debian-based. Kali, Debian based, so gone! All of it.
I think I’d end up on Arch Linux. I considered Fedora, but if I’m going to be dealing with upgrades every six months I feel like I might as well just commit to a rolling release anyway.
What about you? If your root distro vanished from existence, where would you have most likely ended up?
Hmm. I’ve been on Ubuntu for so many years, and now on Mint which is Ubuntu based, so… I would go for something different. Or at least that I see as different from the outside. I’d go for Manjaro, EndeavourOS, openSUSE, Fedora.
I use Zorin for my personal PCs and Debian for 95% of my servers (I have some Ubuntu left over in the mix).
If Debian disappeared tomorrow, I would first be very sad haha. I feel very comfortable with this distribution and I’ve gotten used to what it provides.
That being said, I would instantly hop over to Solus. I used them previously and was super impressed by their setup. eopkg felt like a great package manager and what I couldn’t get from their repos, I could easily get through Flatpak, AppImage, or just compiling it myself.
In fact, just writing this is making me want to put Solus back on one of my laptops! If no one has tried Solus, I would definitely encourage you to give it a shot.
So much of what I like, use and understand is based on Debian I have no idea what I would switch to if Debian disappeared. If it ever happens I would have to start all over with a new search. If Ubuntu disappeared I would switch to Mint DE.
Time to go all Star Trek,space/time,theoretical physics here. With the above being the case the user wouldn’t be aware that “their” distro even existed to begin with.If they were prone to using a Linux distro for whatever reason over Win/Mac they simply would’ve only had the ability to choose from what was offered which would be a distro based on these ( Debian, Red Hat (Fedora), Arch, SUSE (openSUSE), etc.) minus the non-existent root distro or variants based on it.
Without prior knowledge of the previous timeline I could only be influenced by what was offered (in my case Debian never existed) and who knows what I would’ve fancied as my first Linux distro as Debian or Debian based distro wouldn’t be part of the equation.
To much Star Trek and Sci-Fi bouncing around in my head!
If Debian and the other root distributions disappeared I would go back to Slackware, which goes WAY back. It’s evolved nicely, still has that original installation tool, but it works fine. As long is Slackware is there, it would be nice if Slackware CURRENT is also there, because that makes it even easier to catch up or rebuild, but it’s also a really easy distribution to build stuff from if we’re going “Back in Time”. I have no issues running it, and I enjoy bringing it back often anyway.
Having said that, I’m accustomed to using the LTS (Long Term Support) versions of “Ubuntu (MATE)”, which are supported for several years. So, switching to Fedora - that seems that each version is supported only for about 13 months - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/ - would be a significant change in that regard!
I started with Debian (mid-late 90s), but have mostly used Ubuntu on desktops since ~2017 (Debian still on servers).
I’ve used on my primary desktop a number of OSes, and thus I’d be happy to return and use Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, & OpenSuSE which I’ve used before there.
I have found rolling takes more effort to keep functional (meaning I’ve broken my Arch & [OpenSuSE] tumbleweed more often) so my preference is behind that bleeding edge (for starters, I can find more on the internet from people encountering issues before me when a tad behind them; let alone delay means more fixes are included thus I’m getting fewer ‘paper-cuts’).
I prefer a stable system on secondary boxes, stable LTS for servers, but am happy with a development (Ubuntu, testing for Debian or rawhide for Fedora; different terms for ~same thing) on my primary desktop, but I’d be happy with all I mentioned.
I did miss the lack of LTS option with Fedora though; one of the reasons I was happier using OpenSuSE Leap.
To me they’re all GNU/Linux, and I’d be happy on any full distribution (using its own binaries, not an upstream and tweaking that at runtime).
If GNU/Linux disappeared; I’d switch to a BSD; FreeBSD comes to mind (I just remember it was much harder to get fully functional compared to most GNU/Linux systems).
Okay I ran a DistroWatch search. Here would be my options. First they must offer the Mate desktop. These are the ones I would consider. I have played with them all on a USB drive but found them lacking, yet if Debian and Debian based OS’s went away and forced me to another OS I would try these in this order:
(forked from Mandrake,Mandriva)
PCLinuxOS, 2. openSUSE, 3. Manjaro Linux, and 4. Mageia (forked from Mandrake,Mandriva)
PC Linux because it ported Synaptic to RPM. I could still have Synaptic.
What the distro that Debian would act as the next best for if it disappears?
