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> Debian is pretty old, but it's a 2nd gen distro, borne from dissatisfaction with the very early SLS.

Scratches their own itch, check.

> So was Slackware, but it took SLS and improved it. Slackware is arguably the oldest surviving distro.

Itch scratching, check.

>SuSE has roots as a German version of Slackware. Red Hat's package manager was bolted on later.

Pretty sure this was itch scratching as well.

> Gentoo and Arch are relatively modern, being 21st century projects. Arguably, they're 3rd gen.

Both are itch scratching projects!

> Fedora is a 4th gen distro, younger than any of the others here. Its ancestor was Red Hat Linux, which was contemporaneous with Debian -- but was left behind by Debian's technical encancements: in 1996 or so, Debian introduced `apt`, a package manager with automatic recursive dependency resolution. This put it far in the lead of Red Hat, which still only had RPM and no dependency resolution.

Arch and Gentoo are from 2002, and Fedora from 2003.

Fedora was based on someone starting to package FOSS software for RHEL, more itch scratching!

As I understood the story as an analyst at the time, Red Hat’s intention was to just kill RHL after a decent interval but there was sufficient outcry that they came out with Fedora.

But I’m sure there are many different recollections and variants of the Fedora was planned all along story told over the years that the “truth” is probably pretty elusive at this point.

Slackware 2.0 in 1995's Summer was my first distro, it came with the first edition of Linux Unleashed book.

For the younger in the audience that is how we distributed software back in the day, floppies, CDs and DVDs, alongside books and computer magazines.

Very few people had the means to go online, let alone connections able to download a complete distribution.

Going to have to disagree with the chronology. Fedora and RHL isn't a substantial divergence and it belongs with SuSE based on its 1995 roots.

Fedora DID diverge substantially but not when they slapped a new label on the same tin.

Arguably Ubuntu/Mint Make up a 4th generation and Nix/Qubes/and Silverblue are 5th

> Red Hat went in another direction. Red Hat Linux 7 became RHEL, a commercial, paid-for, supported distro.

This was the second time we had a Red Hat 7, though.

what about nixOS ? third gen as well ?

In this kind of hierarchy, I'd personally say fedora is third gen (due to it being so similar to Redhat) and that nixOS is fourth gen. Both came out around the same time, but took such vastly different routes with different kinds of itch scratching.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Gentoo and Arch are different takes on the same ways to build a distro.

Gentoo took the FreeBSD ports tree model and applied it to Linux: still relatively conventional packages, but they're source and you compile the whole thing each time. Arch, still conventional packages, but no fixed release cycle.

Nix throws all that, and the directory tree, out.

Slackware: tarballs are good enough, they're all my dad and grandad ever needed.

RHL: we'll have a package format, where packages can depend on others.

Debian: we'll take the RH idea, but make a tool that can go fetch and install what's needed by what you asked for.

Nix: you don't need to worry about stuff like packages or where stuff is. Tell us what you want and we will make it happen. (But you won't like the disk layout, so don't look.)

Guix: we'll do Nix but with Scheme.

AppImage: hey, you know Acorn did that apps-as-bundles thing first? And it's on Linux as ROX? What if we just zip up the bundles and mount them on demand?

Flatpak: that sounds too hard, dude. But we all agree Git's cool, right? So, what if we could, like, distribute apps over Git?

Gobo: all this packaging and dependency stuff is BS because you're still using a disk layout you improvised on the fly on some 1960s minicomputer with like 20 tiny little hard disks. Here, let's do a clean modern layout like NeXTstep did, but for the whole OS, then you don't really need a packaging tool any more. It's all just bundles, all the way down. But they're versioned. Just copy what you need.

(Entire rest of Linux world) Waah! But mah FHS! If I don't have my FHS then I won't compile!

Gobo: OK, OK, I'll fake it with symlinks for you, then hide it.

Snap: hey, app bundles sounds good, but let's compress them into single files and mount them when needed. Bunch of symlinks and you'll hardly be able to see the joins.

don't list the mount points with mount in any system using snap. You would not like how many garbage are there hiding the real stuff.

findmnt --real

Fair point. It's annoying but it's a small price to pay.

I have machines around here running umpteen distros and OSes, but recently, I switched all my Ubuntu machines to more or less all-snap. I've purged and removed a load of 3rd party repos and replaced them with snap-packaged versions. Even on 12-13 year old machines, it's quick these days, and it makes all kinds of problems on distro upgrades and things just go away.