I’ve been using linux desktop for a year or so now. One noteable thing i keep seeing is that one person will say I dont like XYZ distrobution because of its base. But I am still a little unsure what is meant by it. I am assuming the main difference between each base is the choice of package management(?). But what other factors/aspects that are important for the average user to know about each ‘base’? This is probably quite a broad question to a rather technical answer, but appriciate any answers, and i’ll try my best to understand and read up :)
Something that often gets missed is the difference between packaging conventions between distros.
For example, Debian has Apache httpd packaged as “apache2” and has wrapper scripts for enabling sites. Fedora/RHEL has “httpd” and includes conf.d from the main conf. Arch also has “httpd” but doesn’t have a conf.d out of the box. Of course you can pretty much configue Apache to your heart’s content and have an identical setup between all three distros.
From what I’ve read, Debian tends to patch and change software to fit more into their overall system whereas Fedora and Arch tend to be more upstream.
RPM and Arch both have group packages and metapackages. Debian just has metapackages AFAIK. Debian also has “recommended” and “suggested” levels of soft dependencies, the former which is enabled by default. RPM has the capability for weak dependencies but AFAIK most RPM distros don’t use it. Arch doesn’t have soft/weak dependencies AFAIK.
When you install a new system daemon on Debian, it’s generally enabled and started by default, whereas RPM-based and Arch don’t do that.
When I think of the base of the system I tend to think of some of those more subtle idiosyncrasies that tend to spread around the ecosystems, like Ubuntu and Debian behave quite similarly for instance.