The Linux Ship of Theseus
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pick any distro and install it.
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Then, without installing another distro over the top of it, slowly convert it into another distro by replacing package managers, installed packages, and configurations.
System must be usable and fully native to the new distro (all old packages replaced with new ones).
No flatpaks, avoid snaps where physically possible, native packages only.
Easy: pick two similar distros, such as Ubuntu and Debian or Manjaro and Arch and go from the base to the derivative.
Medium: Same as easy but go from the derivative to the base.
Hard: Pick two disparate distros like Debian and Artix and go from one to the other.
Nightmare: Make a self-compiled distro your target.
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So, any distro to any other distro?
- Installs Fedora Silverblue
- Rebases to Bazzite
Jobs done chief!
installs ubuntu, converts to mint. bam.
The beauty of this exercise is you can make it as easy or challenging as you want just by changing the targets, and finding different combinations can keep things interesting.
kid named nixos-infect:
I think it would be very interesting to convert e.g. a regular Fedora installation into a (so-called “immutable”) Fedora Silverblue installation or vice-versa.
debootstrap makes this easy, and familiarity with that process introduces chroot skills.
This goes against the spirit of the challenge, but as its a singleplayer game (unless you bring friends and SSH!) you can definitely choose to allow dd, chroot, and similar tools
it is pretty terrifying to debootstrap over ssh. constantly checking that you’re on the correct system, and using the chrooted terminal. it’s like a high wire act. at least the first few times.
Shouldn’t everyone that installed Arch the right way be able to do it on most distros, simply after installing Pacman?
Though I think changing (shrink, create new, migrate, delete old) the partition layout would count as installing another distro on top…
Want a challange? Start with something like Silverblue.
Arch already has apt in the repo, so I’d imagine it’s not super hard to build your own Debian from there.
I “broke” linux mint just by trying to pop KDE on, had to timeshift because it messed up my keyboard layout and a whole bunch of other things with my display.
I don’t know how people do these crazy changes without pain, and have a feeling the answer is simply “there’s pain” 😂
I am not educated enough about this, but don’t these kind of games unnecesarrily strain all the servers that host the packages for people that really need them for download and most of these people run these servers for free in good will and faith that they will serve meaningful needs with positive impact? I am sorry for spoiling the fun, but I felt like I had to point this out.
As other commenters have said, its about as strenuous as doing two normal installs.
However, if you want to do this challenge but feel guilty about the consumed resources, consider donating to the two distros you are performing this with to cover any additional service costs. In all likelihood it’ll only cost them fractions of pennies, but any reason to donate to FOSS is always appreciated.
No? It’s the same amount of “strain” as doing two full OS installs of the different distros.
How is this any less meaningful than any other use case? Is downloading a distro to play video games ok? To shitpost on social media? To watch clickbait videos on youtube? Why is this in particular a bad use of resources?
New Game+: speedrun it
I have seen dozens of systems migrated from Gentoo to CentOS by live swapping the userspace and eventually rebooting into the new kernel. A hair raising experience to be sure.
I once switched from Debian i386 to amd64 in-place. That was MUCH harder than you would expect, I guess somewhere between medium and hard in your list. That server is still running that install btw, so in the end it all worked out.
It is quite easy to go slackware -> gentoo from what I remember but minimalist distros might be cheating
Is that even possible? I’m already in panic when I remove a package and it’s dependencies with pacman 😅.
Sure I did replaced Thunar with Nemo, but a few things don’t work exactly how it should, like opening the download directory from Firefox (Known issue BTW) even though all mime-types are correctly set !
Even switching from Alternative -> Base distro seems like a really difficult task :/
Possible? Absolutely. Pleasant? Hell, no.
To add sadism on top of masochism, tell all your friends how you did it in great detail
Hell: from macOS to WSL.
But the rules say the system must be usable.
Linux From Scratch rulez!
Migrate from Nix to Linux From Scratch!
