Okay i'll cheat with Guix then
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Ummm you go first.
This is what I was doing with my server. I've learned there's no better feeling than starting from scratch.
Love the idea of the challenge, my issue would be lack of a validator tool to confirm I'd completed the challenge - any suggestions?
After completing the challenge and making sure your system is usable and can survive a reboot:
If you've kept the old package manager, search for installed packages and make sure that the package manager itself is the only thing left. Then delete it.
You use the new franken system to do an update to the new version of that distro's flavour without bricking the system.
The compiled distros should be easy instead of nightmare tbh
Theoretically one could also prohibit rebooting.
IIRC kexec is pivot_root but for the kernel.
kid named nixos-infect:
So, any distro to any other distro?
- Installs Fedora Silverblue
- Rebases to Bazzite
Jobs done chief!
installs ubuntu, converts to mint. bam.
The beauty of this exercise is you can make it as easy or challenging as you want just by changing the targets, and finding different combinations can keep things interesting.
I would watch a YouTube series doing this
whoever runs the channel will singlehandedly cause a worldwide antidepressant shortage
Reminds me of MattKC, a guy on YouTube who does similar stuff. He ported the .Net framework to win95. very interesting videos, if think this challenge would be exactly his type.
Love him. His lego island port has been a pleasure to watch.
Oh he's the Lego Island guy, I thought he sounded familiar.
Hell: from macOS to WSL.
But the rules say the system must be usable.
New Game+: speedrun it
I "broke" linux mint just by trying to pop KDE on, had to timeshift because it messed up my keyboard layout and a whole bunch of other things with my display.
I don't know how people do these crazy changes without pain, and have a feeling the answer is simply "there's pain" 😂
Reminds me of trying NsCDE… it changed a ton of settings and no other desktop looked right after that. I ended just blowing away my home folder and restoring my files
I have seen dozens of systems migrated from Gentoo to CentOS by live swapping the userspace and eventually rebooting into the new kernel. A hair raising experience to be sure.
Reminds me of a recent post someone converted their system from Debian to OpenBSD via SSH only
“Medium: Same as easy but go from the derivative to the base.”
I can't quite recall, but I think I did exactly that with Ubuntu -> Debian once upon a time. I think Ubuntu was only a year or so old though, so there wasn't a huge amount of divergence back then. As a bonus anecdote I also attempted a semi-successful build of Gentoo on a PPC Mac around the same time (nothing before or after that has compared in its level of nightmare).
I also attempted a semi-successful build of Gentoo on a PPC Mac around the same time (nothing before or after that has compared in its level of nightmare).
Amen!
I think it would be very interesting to convert e.g. a regular Fedora installation into a (so-called “immutable”) Fedora Silverblue installation or vice-versa.
To add sadism on top of masochism, tell all your friends how you did it in great detail
I once switched from Debian i386 to amd64 in-place. That was MUCH harder than you would expect, I guess somewhere between medium and hard in your list. That server is still running that install btw, so in the end it all worked out.
I had forgotten about doing that myself. I did that on a couple servers once the distros had full 64 bit builds. Does that technically count as an architecture swap in-place as well?
Absolutely, that's basically the same thing
debootstrap makes this easy, and familiarity with that process introduces chroot skills.
This goes against the spirit of the challenge, but as its a singleplayer game (unless you bring friends and SSH!) you can definitely choose to allow dd, chroot, and similar tools
it is pretty terrifying to debootstrap over ssh. constantly checking that you're on the correct system, and using the chrooted terminal. it's like a high wire act. at least the first few times.
Oh I totally believe that. I can imagine how stressful that is.
Shouldn't everyone that installed Arch the right way be able to do it on most distros, simply after installing Pacman?
Though I think changing (shrink, create new, migrate, delete old) the partition layout would count as installing another distro on top...
Want a challange? Start with something like Silverblue.
Arch already has apt in the repo, so I'd imagine it's not super hard to build your own Debian from there.
It is quite easy to go slackware -> gentoo from what I remember but minimalist distros might be cheating
Linux From Scratch rulez!
Migrate from Nix to Linux From Scratch!
Is that even possible? I'm already in panic when I remove a package and it's dependencies with pacman 😅.
Sure I did replaced Thunar with Nemo, but a few things don't work exactly how it should, like opening the download directory from Firefox (Known issue BTW) even though all mime-types are correctly set !
Even switching from Alternative -> Base distro seems like a really difficult task :/
Possible? Absolutely. Pleasant? Hell, no.
I am not educated enough about this, but don't these kind of games unnecesarrily strain all the servers that host the packages for people that really need them for download and most of these people run these servers for free in good will and faith that they will serve meaningful needs with positive impact? I am sorry for spoiling the fun, but I felt like I had to point this out.
As other commenters have said, its about as strenuous as doing two normal installs.
However, if you want to do this challenge but feel guilty about the consumed resources, consider donating to the two distros you are performing this with to cover any additional service costs. In all likelihood it'll only cost them fractions of pennies, but any reason to donate to FOSS is always appreciated.
How is this any less meaningful than any other use case? Is downloading a distro to play video games ok? To shitpost on social media? To watch clickbait videos on youtube? Why is this in particular a bad use of resources?
No? It's the same amount of "strain" as doing two full OS installs of the different distros.
You are kind of right. I should have thought about that before commenting.