Yep. When buying a product, it ain’t about the packaging, color of the paint, or the sticker/badge hung on it. It’s all about the service when things go sideways. And at some point something will go wrong, it always does. That’s when you learn just how good or bad a company is.

It’s still the same function at the base level-- to deliver and install/remove, in an easy manor, whatever software package the user wants to use/remove. Whether it’s a good system or not, is a separate issue.

Every Ubuntu based distro I’ve tested allows snaps. The highly touted beginner’s distro Linux Mint sure does. Even Fedora can use snaps and Ubuntu can use flatpaks if you want to be that silly. I have tested that both ways and it worked. But it was merely OKish. It’s just Ubuntu pushes snaps and Fedora pushes flatpaks. So snaps aren’t as insular as you seem to think.

For the user, there isn’t much difference between a snap, flatpak, deb, or rpm in use. The basic install or remove experience is meant to be the same, it’s supposed to be a carefully curated point and click. Even Gentoo’s portage is supposed to be simple for the user. The one other not quite as common, but a bit more universal installation method for users is the appImage package. I use several appImages because that’s the only way they are available. And personally, over the nearly 3 decades of fooling with Linux, I’ve had issues with all of the package management methods. I still have PTSD from being repeatedly caught in rpm hell back in the day or needing to compile from source. (Damn, I’m old)

The longer I use Linux, the more I think that whatever distro you choose, it’s more a matter of how you personally vibe with that distro than anything intrinsically better than the rest of them. Just about everything else is window dressing.

So basically, Ubuntu just with a different name and paint job. (I’ve used them both)

We are all at the most basic level, running pretty much the same kernel, one of the same small handful of desktop environments, and we choose from the same pool of software, (unless you need to get out into the weeds for a program on git hub). Everything else is either window dressing, (package mangers are window dressing-- they all do the same basic thing), or a choice on just how close to the bleeding edge we want to be, (rolling releases or immutable).

Celery is excellent that way. A peanut butter lover’s dream

No! CheezWiz with raisins or nothing! Just like my mother used to make.

My Acer Nitro with Aurora Says Hi!

(I’m thinking maybe going to Kinonite)

Breaking things is a valid way to start learning. Reading man pages is very often difficult and confusing for new users. And much of the documentation is crap anyway-- it’s why distro forums exist. And I’m from a time when distro upgrades/updates were sometimes dicey, (they still can break things on occasions), and you complied your kernel and drivers from scratch.

The mini’s are the latest new hotness for desktop computing. I’ve been running a dirt cheap $90US, mini for 2 years now. It fits extremely well on my desk, just tucked in under the monitor leaving plenty of room for all the other tasks I do daily.

Will it play the latest hot new video game? Nope. But it will run OnlyOffice, FreeCAD and FreeDoom just fine.

Oh no, I haven’t forgotten SuSe. But it’s not an OG distro. It’s based off of Red Hat. Though I thought it was always a better version of Mandrake than Mandrake ever was. (I wonder what TexStar is doing these days…)

I’ve installed and used it several times over the years and thought it was a fine distro. I have never understood why it’s not more to the forefront with it’s rolling release. If you like RPM based distros, SuSe is one to check out for sure.

It’s not even that. It’s a path to madness.

If you want to name them all, Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware where the OG popular distros that became the foundations of all the distros we have today. I ran them all back then.

Unless you’ve worn the sackcloth and ashes of Slack, don’t even at me and my son…

The flash backs to config files. Sooo many config files everywhere. But tarball are Yum!

Ahhh, I knew it. A Man of Culture! Or something else, I’m not sure what though. I have threatened to get an old laptop and install slack on it for fun, but I seem to be too lazy to get it done…

You mirror my travels through the Linux distros. Red Hat and Mandrake, Slack, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, even Mint and now Fedora yet again. I’ve never bothered with setting up a server though, I just don’t have the need or desire.

And as repeatedly told and retold every year…

And I’m using, let’s see, (Goes into Settings to check): Fedora KDE Plasma 41. Meh, it works OK I guess. It’s getting hard to tell the difference between distros anymore. And I’ve been doing this long enough that I just something that doesn’t bother me for attention anymore.

You started in the 90’s and you didn’t don the sackcloth and ashes of Slack? At least for a little bit? Ah, the joys of writing config files!

Still got to have the money. And police departments need to have budget to replace equipment.

I have been elected to a city council several times and have gone over police budgets and it was no easier for the police to get money replace a squad car or get any of the “goodies” you think are so easy to them to get. There is only so much money to be had in any city budget.

Let me introduce you to ‘We ain’t got no money to buy anything’ trick.

Replaced by who? And where is the profit in selling something to someone who has no money to buy?

You act like you don’t understand police departments need grants to buy those things also.

That’s unlikely. You need to get grants from the federal government, chiefly the DHS, to get money to buy major equipment. There ain’t anymore federal grants remember. Small volunteer, (70% of all fire depts in the US), services are especially reliant on those grants to replace major assets.

Source: Been on committees to spec and buy ambulances and fire trucks and turnout gear. Even boots and gloves sometimes.