The Linux Ship of Theseus

  1. pick any distro and install it.

  2. Then, without installing another distro over the top of it, slowly convert it into another distro by replacing package managers, installed packages, and configurations.

System must be usable and fully native to the new distro (all old packages replaced with new ones).

No flatpaks, avoid snaps where physically possible, native packages only.

EDIT: Some clarification on some of the clever tools brought up here:

chroot, dd, debootstrap, and partition editors that allow you to install the new system in an empty container or blanket-overwrite the old system go against the spirit of this challenge.

These are very useful and valid tools under a normal context and I strongly recommend learning them.

You can use them if you prefer, but The ship of Theseus was replaced one board at a time. We are trying to avoid dropping a new ship in the harbor and tugging the old one out.

It may however be a good idea to use them to test out the target system in a safe environment as you perform the migration back in the real root, so you have a reference to go by.

Easy: pick two similar distros, such as Ubuntu and Debian or Manjaro and Arch and go from the base to the derivative.

Medium: Same as easy but go from the derivative to the base.

Hard: Pick two disparate distros like Debian and Artix and go from one to the other.

Nightmare: Make a self-compiled distro your target.

    • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Why does that sound familiar.

      Did they load an OS into ram to run ssh then rebuild the machine, also some VPS that the provider was dragging their feet on remote hands.

      • ryannathans@aussie.zone
        1·
        13 days ago

        I can’t find it now but basically something like that yeah. VPS provider only gave them SSH on linux so couldn’t run the openbsd installer any normal way either

  • Jonathan@lemmy.world
    4·
    15 days ago

    “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).

  • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
    4·
    14 days ago

    Love the idea of the challenge, my issue would be lack of a validator tool to confirm I’d completed the challenge - any suggestions?

    • Madagaskar_sky@lemmy.world
      3·
      14 days ago

      You use the new franken system to do an update to the new version of that distro’s flavour without bricking the system.

    • Semperverus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      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.

  • Overspark@feddit.nl
    2·
    15 days ago

    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.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
    2·
    13 days ago

    Easymode: pick a fedora ublue distro and go from bazzite to silver blue :)

    Title

    You can rebase with a single command I think.

  • villainy@lemmy.world
    1·
    15 days ago

    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.

  • sntx@lemm.ee
    1·
    15 days ago

    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.

    • swab148@lemm.ee
      1·
      15 days ago

      Arch already has apt in the repo, so I’d imagine it’s not super hard to build your own Debian from there.

    • Semperverus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      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

  • d_k_bo@feddit.org
    1·
    15 days ago

    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.

  • Go-On-A-Steam-Train@lemmy.ml
    1·
    15 days ago

    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” 😂