Hey guys! Trying to understand what developers actually do to create a yet another distro, or what are the differences between existing distros. Lets say we have ubuntu and fedora. What are the differences? Excluding DE, Installer, theme, installed packages/libs and package manager. They both are FHS compliant, both running systemd what else?

Just wondering if there could be a way to “simulate”, lets say ubuntu on fedora. For example providing every program that should be present on ubuntu in fedora. Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora? Im not gonna do that though, just curious about this question.

Thank you!

  • Crazazy [hey hi! :D]@feddit.nl
    1·
    11 months ago

    This Arch story reminds me a lot of a r/talesfromtechsupport story that went remarkably similar but had a less happy ending for the Linux enthusiast, where he basically disabled the TPM and couldn’t access the company network because the network seemed to only allow trusted machines.

    Can’t find it right now but maybe I can do some digging once I’m on a computer

    • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      Funny you should mention the company network.

      To tell the next part of my story, when I did all of what I described, I first backed up the KDE neon install onto a tiny little partiton. So I still had it to go back to if I needed to.

      And after I’d been using Arch for a good while, the VPN folks decided to retire OpenVPN and switch to something called “GlobalProtect”.

      They run BMC, a remote machine management program, on all freshly-imaged machines. That lets them (un)install shit without the user’s knowledge and stuff. Windows users had lots of horror stories about “the great Java uninstall of 2018” where the PC Support folks just randomly decided one day to uninstall OpenJDK from every Windows user’s machine. While we were trying to write/maintain Java software written in-house. (This happened multiple times within a few years.)

      One of the biggest benefits to running Linux (even if it was KDE Neon) was that the PC Support folks were scared of Linux and stayed very hands-off. They never (un)installed stuff remotely for KDE Neon users.

      …until they switched to GlobalProtect. They wouldn’t give out the .deb for GlobalProtect to let folks install it themselves. They’d only install it for you via BMC.

      But since I was running Arch and had never installed BMC, (actually I have another story about BMC on Arch, but I’ll save it for when I have more time), my machine was passed over when they installed GlobalProtect on all the KDE Neon machines.

      So I rebooted into KDE Neon, asked pretty please that they install GlobalProtect, and have been using KDE Neon ever since.

      Now, I’ve done nothing to disable the TPM or anything on Arch. I don’t think even if GlobalProtect uses the TPM that there’s any reason it couldn’t do so while on Arch. But I tried just copying the install from KDE Neon to Arch file-for-file and running it. It didn’t work. I had to strace it to get more info and… don’t remember what the error was about now. Some inter-process communication thing I had never heard of before wasn’t able to talk to the daemon process.

      I keep telling myself I’m going to get GlobalProtect running on Arch again so I don’t have to keep using KDE Neon, but it’s been a while since I’ve worked on that any.

      Also, one of my coworkers had been working for years by connecting to the company VPN from a personal machine. And I told him he needed to figure out his VPN situation months before they actually turned off OpenVPN. But he didn’t heed my warnings and when they shut off OpenVPN, he was screwed. He took the Mac they’d sent him when he was first hired off of mothballs and tried to get it running. They ended up just telling him they needed to send him a new machine. So he basically couldn’t work for almost two weeks while he waited for the new KDE Neon machine he ordered to get set up/imaged/etc and then shipped halfway across the country. He uses KDE Neon on a company laptop now.

      There are some great stories about how we’ve messed with PC Support at this company. Lol.