Comment by int_19h

7 years ago

Conversely, I wonder what this does to the Linux ecosystem. It looks like at this point, Debian and Arch are the only major self-sufficient distros (i.e. not built on top of another distro) that are still community-owned and community-driven; and of the two, Debian is clearly more broadly popular. So, will this result in Debian becoming the de facto standard of "open Linux"? This could make things interesting when it comes to packaging etc.

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int_19h

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rickycook  7 years ago

well, that’s basically already happened. with its strict adherence to GNU, and with the truly phenomenal number of distros based on debian (especially if you include ubuntu derived distros, but ubuntu is so different these days that idk if it’s really the same any more?)

  • int_19h  7 years ago

    Is it really so different though? It feels like it's been converging if anything, what with Ubuntu on systemd these days, and moving from Unity to Gnome Shell. What are the substantial differences at this point?

bigbugbag  7 years ago

What about PCLinuxOS, openSUSE, Mageia, Void, Nixos, Solus ?

  • int_19h  7 years ago

    None of these qualify as "mainstream" compared to RedHat/CentOS/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu. Even SUSE, which used to be in the big league, is a shadow of its former glory.

    If you look at what runs on production servers, it's virtually always RHEL/CentOS, or Debian/Ubuntu. Everybody else isn't even above 5%, and most of those you've listed are in fractional digits.

    For another data point, if you look at websites, Debian+Ubuntu is already >50%. At this point, I think it's well on its way to becoming the Linux distro, with everything else being relegated to the hacker/boutique niche. And I think that this announcement, and what IBM is likely to do with RHEL afterwards, will accelerate that trend substantially.

    • update  7 years ago

      Shame. As far as I can tell OpenSUSE & Fedora are on the same level. I often struggle deciding which one to install on new servers because I love them both so much.