From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
- 0 users online
- 5 users / day
- 20 users / week
- 27 users / month
- 16 users / 6 months
- 20 subscribers
- 684 Posts
- 1.7K Comments
- Modlog
The distro packages are not distro-agnostic. But a linux release tarball is distro-agnostic, although some system settings can affect it.
We’ve been doing release tarballs for literally decades now and there’s nothing wrong with them, but package managers help with updates, GUI, and dependency management. AppImage in particular supports PGP signatures and differential upgrades, which is pretty cool. Flatpak has interesting approach about “portals” for sandboxing, although it’s far from user-friendly or secure so far. Snap has really nothing going on for it and there’s absolutely 0 reason to use it. [0]
[0] Yes there’s one reason, as always, it’s pushed by a big corp. So leap.se project for example packages bitmask only for snap because that’s where their userbase is. Such a shame.