The original post: /r/linux by /u/Omar_Eldahan on 2024-11-20 11:23:26.

To be fair, I’m quite new in using Linux. However after using a few distros before landing on Fedora, I’ve noticed that over the past few years, the differences between the distros have gone from pretty significant to vanishingly small. Consider the following points:

  • Ubuntu: Is (if I understand correctly) moving towards supporting the latest kernels rather than just the LTS bringing it somewhat closer to Fedora in terms of supporting the cutting edge. Aside from Snap, telemetry and other proprietary stuff, is there anything that really makes Ubuntu stand out?
  • Fedora: the cutting edge distro, has been incredibly stable and hasn’t been making any huge shakeups or changes. It’s move to only support Wayland comes during a time when X11 is barely just a shambling corpse that has waaaay outlived its purpose. Even Fedora’s focus on only FOSS is easily addressed through the RPM Fusion repositories.
  • Arch: the bleeding edge rolling distro, sometimes now gets new versions and updates of software later than Fedora (see: KDE Plasma 6). Also, it’s no longer the incredibly difficult and super complex distro it once was and has become far more mainstream and user friendly.
  • Pop!_OS: is basically Ubuntu with all of the crappy stuff removed. The main differentiating factor, Cosmic DE, is already available for most distros.
  • Debian: old reliable, is very stable as always…but so are all of the other distros. It’s easier to differentiate based on stability when everything is breaking all the time, but right now everything is so much more stable that Debian’s rock solid stability is starting to feel more and more in line with all the rest
  • Linux Mint: Is just old Ubuntu (Cinnamon is available as a DE for most other distros, so I’m not sure what the main differentiation is here).
  • Linux Mint DE: Is just Debian with Cinnamon…I guess?
  • etc. etc. etc.

In short, all of the cutting edge distros that used to be very unstable, are now quite stable in most use cases, and most of the stable distros are adopting more modern technology, and so its feels like their all starting to converge.

Now, I know that there are some distros that buck this trend. Off the top of my head, I can think of Gentoo, NixOS, and Void, but in many cases these are more niche distros for specific use cases. All of the really big distros feel like they are starting to converge and going from Ubuntu to Pop!_OS to Linux Mint to Debian to Fedora never really feels too much different (besides having to use dnf instead of apt). This is especially true since all these distros can install the same DEs

I might be oversimplifying and I’m sure that there’s all more differences under the hood for many of these, but from a user experience perspective, they’re becoming almost indistinguishable. Also, I may be wrong, and I’m sure that the good people of the Linux community will not shy away from telling me if that is the case, but I was wondering if people were starting to feel the same way.