Distro Makeover!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 10:04:47AM -0400, interlug-list wrote:
> A Distro-statement that might just keep us entertained for the weekend. 
> 
> "Any sufficiently advanced Linux Guru can modify any distribution to
> make it appear to be any other distribution. "  
> 
> I support this statement by starting with the easy stuff.  Even a low
> level user like me could select a theme in Fedora that makes the desktop
> appear to be Win(something) at a quick glance.  By changing icons, key
> mappings and file names the makeover is a little more convincing,
> perhaps even during use.  
> 
> But what about a more knowledgeable user?  Can a person start with (say)
> Ubuntu and make it appear to be (say) Slackware?  Or Fedora to Gentoo? 
> Will the makeover stand up to analysis?  How much?   
> 
> When you do a makeover like this, when does the distro change from being
> the original distro, to a modified-original distro, to an emulated
> target distro, to the target distro?  

Well the main feature of each distribution is the version of each piece
of software, what options they are compiled with, and of course which
package management system is in use, and where it stores configuration
files for various things along with the scripts to start and stop
various daemons.

If you change any of those (possibly not counting the version/options of
a given piece of software) then you are really running your own
customized distribution at that point since you are no longer likely to
be compatible with upgrades to the original distribution.

On the other hand short of changing _everything_ about your system to
match the target distribution, you can't claim to be running the target
distribution.  Of course this is sometimes how a new distribution is
tarted.  You start with something and then you change things until they
are how you want them and continue from there as a new distribution.

I really doubt you could easily change one distrubion to appear to be
another to someone very familiar with the target distribution, unless
willing to totally replace everything at which point any nice features
of the original distribution are likely lost.

Lennart Sorensen
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