 Today, we're going to go back to a little bit of the basics as far as our GNU slash Linux operating systems. Let's talk about Linux distributions. When people talk about a Linux distro, what do they mean? Well, if you take the word quite literally a Linux distribution, it's basically a Linux operating system that is distributable, meaning you can share it, right? Just typically these days, we think of it being on an ISO, right? Somebody has already created an ISO image that you could then burn to a USB thumb drive or DVD or whatever it happens to be, and then you can install it to this machine and that machine. You can share it with a friend and they can install it on their machine, right? It's distributable, it's a distribution, but most people go a little bit beyond that. Having a shareable Linux operating system doesn't necessarily make it its own unique distribution. When people talk about Linux distros, they're talking about a distributable Linux operating system that comes with its own custom configurations and its own custom settings. That's what people mean when they talk about a Linux distro. So when we're talking about Linux distros, we're talking about basically having a Linux operating system complete with its own desktop environment that's already been customized and configured. That's really what a Linux distro is. A matter of fact, I would say when people think about a Linux distro, what makes a Linux distro, right now we're looking at a screenshot of Manjaro KDE. What makes Manjaro Manjaro as far as Manjaro KDE Plasma? Well, the really nice naming, right? Or what makes Linux Mint Cinnamon Linux Mint? Well, it's that Cinnamon desktop that they created, especially for Linux man. Of course, you can install Cinnamon on many other distributions. But what makes Mx? Mx is because they have this XFCE desktop environment that they've rather innovatively customized. It looks a little different than every other XFCE. So it's not necessarily under the hood stuff that makes these Linux distributions different, although there are some differences under the hood as far as the package management system. Sometimes they'll have different init systems and things like that. What most Linux users, as far as general desktop users think of, as far as what separates Linux distributions from each other, it's what you're looking at right now. It's the desktop, it's the customizations, it's the plugins, the extensions, and all of that that's already been enabled out of the box on these distros. Now, I think there is a good analogy that could be made between maintaining a Linux distro is almost like maintaining your own .files repository. Many of us on Linux do this. Those of us that have been around for a while, maybe we're kind of power users, and we get tired of every time we distro hop, every time we reinstall a Linux distribution, we get tired of having to go and redo all our configs for all our various programs. So what we do is we save our .files. .files are essentially configuration files, the settings files for all of our programs, and that way every time we reinstall, we just pull down our .files that we have saved, our settings, and boom, magically we get our desktop environment exactly the way it was on the previous distro we were on. We basically are just taking our own Linux distro with us wherever we go. For those of you that are new to Linux, let me switch over to the desktop and I'll show you what I mean by the .files. So on Linux, we have what are known as hidden files and hidden directories. These files and directories that are hidden all begin with a period. That's why we call them .files, it's because they begin with a period, a dot. And there is a directory in your user's home directory called .config, and this directory is where 95% of your configuration files live on the system. Most programs will have a folder in here. So you'll have various folders with program names and inside these folders are their config files. It's their settings files essentially. So for example, if I go into the nvm folder, so I have neovm installed on this computer, there is the neovm config files. I could edit them, I could change them, I could, you know, do whatever I want with that neovm config, and then I could push it to my GitLab. I got a .files repository on my GitLab. And then the next time I distro hop, I don't have to worry about rewriting from scratch a new neovm config. I've already got it saved. Or my qtile config. If I scroll down to qtile, so home directory slash .config slash qtile, and there is the config .py. It's a Python script that basically is the settings file, the configuration file for qtile, which I'm in today. Technically maintaining your own .files, you know, saving your own .files. That way you can, you know, take them with you everywhere. That's not necessarily a Linux distribution, because is that really a distributable operating system that you could share with somebody? No, because it's just the configuration files. It's not a complete operating system, right? Like, what are they putting those things on? You would actually have to probably put those configuration files on an ISO with an existing operating system for it to be shareable. Or you would have to have some kind of net install script, maybe an install script, like a lot of people do post installation scripts for, you know, various operating systems, like I have one for Arch Linux with DTOS. People have post installation scripts for Ubuntu and Debian and all kinds of other things. And that kind of works to you wouldn't necessarily have an ISO that the person of that post installation script created, but what you would do, you would start with an existing ISO and then just add their repository of software or whatever it happens to be to pull down, you know, all the various things. That's what I do with DTOS. So that's kind of a distribution, although a lot of people push back on me that it's not a distribution because I didn't create an ISO. But of course, you know, there are other distributions that don't necessarily distribute via ISO. A lot of them actually are command line installers where you actually pull down source code through the command line and build things. But, you know, that's a different topic. But a distribution is essentially a bunch of configuration files and settings files that gives you this desktop experience. For example, let's imagine that this is my desktop experience, right? My desktop environment. And if you were getting my Linux distribution, you would get this exact same desktop out of the box. And from that point forward, you could configure it to your heart's content. So I just wanted to, you know, clarify a little bit of what makes a Linux distribution a distribution because a lot of people will tell you things like there's too many distributions or every distribution is kind of the same. Distros don't matter. You hear that a lot. You know, there's they all basically are the same under the hood, which I've said that, you know, I could live on any Linux distribution because at the end of the day, they all run the same bash shell for the most parts, the default shell, virtually every GNU slash Linux distribution. And then they all have the GNU core utils for the most part. And essentially, if I have the same shell and the same shell utilities, I can do practically anything I want on any Linux distribution. But what really makes a Linux distribution is the stuff beyond that. And for the most part, it's the desktop environment. It's always been about the desktop environment. That's really what makes the Linux distribution different. And that's what when people think of a Linux distribution, when people think of Ubuntu, what do they think about? They think about that very unique GNOME desktop experience with the side panel, right? Or previously they thought about the Unity desktop environment, because that was kind of unique to Ubuntu. When people think about Linux Mint, even if they don't run Cinnamon, when people think about what is Linux Mint, they kind of think Cinnamon, right? Because that's a large part of what the development team for Linux Mint spends their time working on is that Cinnamon desktop environment. When I think about Solis, I think about Budgie, the desktop environment. When I think about Deepin, I think about the Deepin desktop environment, right? Well, when I think about Debian even, I think about the vanilla GNOME desktop environment straight from upstream, right? That's just horrible looking out of the box. But that's Debian. Arch is the same way. When I think Arch, I think of, well, when I think Arch, I think of a TTY, because that's all you get after a base Arch install. That's what you think. You think about the UI, the UI experience. Now, obviously there's other differences between distros. There's other ways that all of these distros differentiate themselves. Some distributions, for example, are a little more strict as far as free software versus proprietary software. Some distributions don't really care. Obviously, distributions have different package management systems, different package managers. Some distributions use some of these third-party distroagnostic package managers like flat packs and snaps and app images. You've got some differences, again, under the hood that for the average desktop computer user won't matter much, because they're not interested in package management, right? They don't care how the packages are installed. They're not using package managers at the command line. Typically, they're going to use the GUI package manager that shipped with the desktop environment. Again, for average computer users, it's all about that desktop experience. That's the distro. And this is one of the reasons why I'm not a distro hopper anymore. I don't hop on my personal equipment. I'll test out distributions in virtual machines or on test laptops. Sometimes, of course, you guys get some of that experienced on camera, because you guys sometimes like to see the latest distributions tried out for the first time. But as far as what I run, the Linux distributions on all of my actual computers, my workstation here at the office and my personal computer at home, I haven't distro hopped on those things in years. It's because I know I'm not going to really get anything different from leaving this distribution I'm on right here and moving to the next one, because I have all of my dot files, right? I have my own personal desktop environment that I take with me everywhere I go on Linux. So distro hopping, if at the end of the day, the most important experience is that GUI experience, that desktop experience. If it's going to be exactly the same, why distro hop? And once you realize that, once you realize what a Linux distribution actually is, it kind of cures you from that distro hopping bug. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Paul, Royal West, Armor Dragon, Commander Henry George, Lee Methos, Nate Irion, Paul Peace, Archimdor, Realities for Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solastry, Tulsa Devler, Ward Jentoo, and Ubuntu, and Willy, these guys. They're my highest-eared patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this video describing what a Linux distribution actually is, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux, free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. These guys. And the operating system, all it is, is a bootloader for Emacs.