Linux is a clearing in the woods. You have the freedom to build a cabin yourself from logs with your barehands with LFS, buy building materials and power tools to build a completely custom house yourself with something like Arch or Gentoo, get a kit and put it up yourself with Fedora or Debian, put up a prefab with Ubuntu, or just pull up a trailer for a while and move on with a live ISO.
Perhaps Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc are either pre-built homes delivered complete by truck or a stick-built home built to specifications provided by an architect.
In any case, remodeling is a possibility.
I'd say they're more like the developer, they've made the house their way, you can kinda change it, change the paint, move the furniture but you can't make any major structural changes.
As much as Microsoft sucks their os is generally pretty solid. Not great but good enough for most
(I say this having not had a windows install on a personal machine for over a year now)
You will not find a developer standing at your front door saying "Sorry, Updating the house- you can't go in right now" - and if you buy a home usually you can remodel but if you are in an HOA you probably have to beg permission to do anything that would be visible from the street.
where linux
Sounds like Gnome.
So can Canonical. The difference is, they don't.
So far, and since I have been running Debian for a while now I don't know about Ubuntu specifically, All the distros I have used either show an update is available, or you check for updates.
You have the choice and control to install the update and can do it later if now is not a good time. Or don't install it at all, it's your system.
Obviously, yes. My point is: Do you read and understand all changes in the code for each update? You need to trust the maintainers, cause they could theoretically push out any code with the update.
Some HOAs are better than others.
Unfortunately, all it takes is a change in the HOA board to turn a better HOA into a badder HOA.
Please do tell how they would do that.
You trust their repos.
With every apt update, they could push whatever code they want onto your PC.
Same as with literally any binary-based OS.
Not sure why you specify binary-based OS's. Following Gentoo's upgrade guide also gets you potentially whatever they want on your systemp
Someone definitely reads the changed code of Gentoo packages. You are saying that every operating system on the planet is untrustworthy, besides gentoo and a few other source-based distros, but let's target Ubuntu in particular.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying you need to trust the people making your OS cause no way in hell is anyone else able to audit every update they push.
Whether your OS is trustworthy depends on their history. In that regard, I'd give Ubuntu a solid B-
Fair enough
How does that work, exactly? I don't actually know. Are they compiling their own copies of the upstream code changes?
Yes, they're taking the source code from upstream, modifying ("patching") it, compiling it, then uploading their compiled binaries to the Ubuntu repo where your system downloads them during an update.
You can technically download the source code as well, if you activate the source repo. But hardly any end user does. And the source code you get doesn't compile to the same binary you get from the repo anyway. (This would be called a "reproducible build". Some distros try to be reproducible. Ubuntu doesn't, they have other priorities.)
Thank you. That makes sense why some downstream distros designed for specific purposes (e.g. gaming) might include a handful of their own repos for specific software.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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