 So, this isn't a planned video at all, just spur of the moment coming out to do this video because twice today, in fact twice in like the last hour or so, I've been shared the same article by two different people, and it's a short little article, I'm not even sure if it's meant as a joke or if people are saying to me as a joke, I think the article's somewhat trying to be serious but it's just ridiculous. So what it is, it's an article talking about a distro that is no longer being developed. It was a distro that I had never heard of before and it mentioned a few other distros that have recently been, you know, development has stopped on. One of them was, I forget what it was called, it's some distros specifically for doing math, which is a very niche distro, so I'm not surprised that's not around anymore. But here's the thing, the article's kind of like, should we even continue bothering with Linux because these distros keep dying? Which is just a silly thought, I mean think about how many hundreds of Linux distros are currently being worked on and how many of them you've never even heard of. And there's new ones popping up all the time and there's new ones dying all the time. It happens, it's always happened, people make distros, hey I've made distros before, when I first switched to Linux I was like this is so cool, I can remaster this ISO and I would take a distribution and change the theme and post it up, you know, not that anyone ever used the ones I made, but anyone can make a Linux distro, it's not that hard. And you know what? Here's the truth, this is, well how I feel, okay? I think it's great there are so many distros. A lot of people are like, oh it's, it's fragmentation, no it's called choice. It's great that we have all these choices, but the truth is most of those choices are useless. We don't need all these distros. It's great that we have them and if you want to use a distro that I don't use that's fine. I don't care what distro you use for the most part, you know, as long as it's free software, what do I care? You know, but at the same time I kind of think most distros are based on one of the primary distros and if you go to like distro watch most of the ones that people download are going to be either Debian based or Arch based. I'm not saying there aren't Gen2, obviously there's Gen2 based ones and Fedora based ones, but you know out of all these four, but especially Debian and Arch are two of the probably most common. It's like do we really need a distro based on Debian or distro based on Arch when you can just use Debian Arch? Why does it matter? Why when I first switched to Linux I spent the first two years every other week switching to another distro trying all these different distros and eventually I settled with Debian. Why? Because I like Debian. I like the the distros I use that were based on Debian. So why not just use Debian? The benefit of these distros is to get something out of the box and I still like on my flash drive I'll have Linux Mint or some other distro. It's good for out of the box because I'm using it as a live distro. I use it for troubleshooting on machines or to set up on someone's machine that I'm not going to spend time. See when I set up Debian on my machine I have my configuration files. I have things set up how I want. I don't want some preset up thing. Some people do and that's fine but that's what these distros are for. It's for I'm going to pop this in this out of the box. These are what I like. Really a lot of the out of the box stuff you're not going to end up using but maybe you like the way their desktop is. Maybe you like the way their whatever is their network manager they use. All those things you should be able to set up if you're using a Debian based distro you should be able to do all that stuff on Debian. If you're using an ArchBase distro you should be able to do all that stuff on Arch. Just a matter of is this out of the box. Really in general if there's if you can do something on one Linux distribution you should be able to do it on any Linux distribution. If you can't do that thing on another Linux distribution I would ask why are these developers developing something and not sharing it upstream which is kind of a pain in the butt. If you're going to create something share it upstream so other distros can have it. Again the benefit of having different distros for the most part when it comes to these based on other ones are just out of the box. Now you know you have things like Arch and Fedora. I'm just using those as an example because they're two of the more popular ones. They have different package managers. They have different repositories and maybe that's why I mean I don't care what package manager I'm using. I use apt and aptitude you know because I'm used them but I also use lightweight distros. I use you know Slitaz which uses the Taz PKG package manager. It doesn't matter it's package manager is a package manager and yeah there might be technical differences but it just downloads and installs my package and then re any dependencies for it. So I don't care what distro you're using and the fact that distros don't last if the distro really is bringing something that is new and unique just like like Debian and Arch are different in many different ways. They're not based on it so if I get a Debian based distro again why not just use Debian. What are you bringing to the table mainly out of the box configuration. Besides that most these distros don't offer anything special and that's why they don't last because why would I use that when I could use something else. You know some of them do. Sometimes they bring new desktop interfaces maybe new themes but again you can usually get those installed on other distros it's just the out of the box thing. So the reason a lot of distros die is because they're unneeded. Lots of times these distros die out because they're maintained by a handful of people and these people get tired and they just you start a project and then you get tired of working on it. I know exactly how that is that's why I like packages or projects that I work on that I can finish up in a couple of days or do at my leisure. You know and I can completely understand the whole gang burnt out just because a distro developer gets burnt out doesn't mean that distro is no longer useful. If that distro really was great and people really like someone will pick up where they left off. For example going to like different versions of Linux we're looking at like Android you had sciongine mod sciongine mod eventually died off but then other ones came in like linia joe s which I've played with a bit and that's a great thing about open source the projects never die unless it's really not useful you know if it's abandoned it's because no one's using it if people are really using it somebody is if they're really dependent on they really think it's a great program they will continue developing it and if not then great it's dead no one really needed it. I mean there might be someone out there in the corner somewhere who's like oh I really needed this package in case in that case if that you're that person you can keep it going. So to have an article saying oh some distros failed maybe we should just forget about Linux altogether that is just ridiculous again there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of distros most people probably only have tried things if you go to like distro watch the first 20 of them you know they come and they go anyone can make a distro just because someone stops working on a distro doesn't mean that that Linux isn't working and doesn't mean that we're fragmented that's another thing that I thought about doing videos on even linestore of oh the Linux desktop environment is fragmented fragmented no people like different things desktop environments are the one thing that really makes Linux you know so great is that we all like different desktop environments I don't care what desktop environment you maybe yours you know is more of a you know a processor hungry who cares if it runs fine on your computer you use that I like to stick to lightweight stuff even though I have a decent computer I just like working with lightweight software that's personal preference and the fact that we have these options is great and again this might seem like ramp it's like two people within like an hour shared this article with me and I'm not sure if they were sharing it as a joke like they're really concerned oh no another distro died distros have been dying for the last 20 years and new distros are coming up all the time so that's pretty much that's that's my rant I hope you uh I'd love to hear what you guys think is is linux distros dying these linux distros that you've never heard of have never used it might even scientific linux scientific linux was the other one I think recently died they mentioned the article which was specifically for doing certain mathematical equations and graphics I don't know I've never really used it and that's another thing sometimes these distros are very specific this is a distro for this which basically usually means that it's based on another distribution and has the packages for this installed again I could install debbie and and install those same packages so the fact that when you have these niche uh you know distributions that are for a certain thing it's like yeah that's great if you're going to use it for that certain thing but in most cases you can just install those packages and if I'm just using as a regular desktop do I need scientific linux and again I never used it if you have and you have some sort of comments on that comment below um yeah that's pretty much it let me know below what you think about this what distros are you using or were you using one of these distros died out and you're really upset that they died out uh again I use debbie and debbie has been around for a long long time it has a lot of support has a lot of developers um I don't think it's going anywhere for a while same with things like arch uh and you know obviously fedora is a big old company um yeah thanks for watching visit films by chris dot com that's chris the k comment below I'd love to hear what you think and I hope that you have a great day