I see often people say that the distro you are using doesn’t matter. One can turn any distro into another. And I do not agree with that. If that was true, why do we even have so many distributions? I always said, if distros don’t matter…
- … why distro hop?
- … why don’t you use Ubuntu then?
- … why don’t you recommend Archlinux to a newcomer?
- … why don’t you use Kali Linux as a server?
- … why don’t you use Batocera or SteamOS as your daily driver?
- … why do you trust a community distro more than a corporate distro? (or vice versa)
I don’t think that distros only matter to newcomers. Maybe it matters for experienced users even more.
Are you bored? Did you just build a strawman version of your own community to argue about something that is trivially easy to answer for everyone in this community? I am seriously confused. I have never ever heard anyone say that you could turn any distro into any other. That is just obviously not true. And every single question on your bullet point list is equally easy to answer.
When people say that it doesn’t matter which distro you use what they obviously mean is that the desktop environment has the way more immediate and tangible impact on the user experience. So as long as the newcomer choses one of the many distros that have an intuitive installer (so obviously not Arch), are reasonably up to date, have a broad software package repository, and come with one of the major environments pre installed, it really does not matter that much.
I found certain hardware to be a problem with Debian based distros and had to install Fedora or OpenSUSE. There was a bios bug that those distros worked around, the debian distros either failed the install process or threw bug on boot that killed everything.
So sometimes you are forced to distro hop.
In a very technical sense, you can turn any distro into any other distro, in the same way you can turn Windows into OpenBSD.
It’s probably also true in a smaller way, where you could technically reengineer a distro manually by replacing components and reconfiguring things until it works, but why? Someone already did that.
In a ship of theseus kind of way i guess you can turn almost anything into anything else :p