Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
The amount of software available in the package manager, without adding external repositories, exceeds that I’ve seen in any other distro I’ve used. Even with epel, I feel like others fall short.
The ability to modify the build time flags of software while still using the package manager is also huge. I hate when ffmpeg doesn’t have speex support because some upstream dev figured it was a corner use case.
It’s me, I’m the target demographic. I’m the one asshole who wants to build ffmpeg with speex support, clamav without milter support and rxvt WITHOUT blink support.
There are some pretty great userspace helpers too. Things to ensure your kernel is always built with the same options. Things to upgrade all your python or perl modules to the new interpreter version for you. Tools for rebuilding all the things based on a reverse dependency search.
Slotted installs are handled in a sane, approachable, and manageable way.
The filesystem layout is standards compliant.
I recall someone on /r/Gentoo saying something like “Gentoo is linux crack, when you get a handle on it, nothing compares.”
When I boot my laptop into fedora/arch/mint/etc (or really any non-bsd based distro), I feel like I’m using someone else’s laptop. There are a bunch of git repos under /usr/src for the software I wanted that wasn’t in the package manager. I need to manage their updates separately. Someone else has decided which options are in this very short list of GUIs. I’m using whatever cron daemon they chose, not the one I want. Why is there a flat text log file under /var/db/? Why won’t you just let me exist without any swap mounted?
$PATHis just a fucking mess.