tl;dr: Fedora’s debugging packages work, Ubuntu’s are out of date.

Linux = Linux = Linux, whether Arch or Slackware or Ubuntu or OpenSUSE or Linux from scratch as I once did (before there were instructions!). Unless and until the kernel forks and someone decides to modify the syscall table, they all use the same basic syscalls, they typically share the same basic libraries and core utilities, etc. They’re all the same.

Why did I use Ubuntu-based distributions? (Note: Not Debian) Because Ubuntu came pre-configured with all the things I did not care to learn or manually configure: ACPI, firmware, X11, a pretty WM theme, etc. I did not particularly care whether I was running Mint, Elementary, Ubuntu MATE or basic Ubuntu (except Unity…nah). As long as it did not do strange things like remove /sbin/ifconfig or have a radically different file structure than I was used to. I felt at home with knowing where the standard file paths were, and knew how to administer my machine. Their package repository was pretty solid. It had almost everything I wanted – and what little was not on it was typically available in Debian-package format. The broader Linux community effectively standardized on this package format. This is crucial. Debian’s apt and FreeBSD’s pkg are in my muscle-memory at this point.

Literally one thing pushed me over: Ubuntu’s SystemTap was broken. Utterly broken!

I got into OS-level programming, specifically, porting a Linux WiFi driver to FreeBSD. I wanted to use SystemTap, Linux’s answer to DTrace, to help understand what is going on during live execution. But SystemTap does not work on Ubuntu – at least currently.

But wait, I thought Linux = Linux = Linux and programs from 20 years ago will still work. Why does SystemTap fail?

SystemTap works by producing C code for a kernel module, compiling it and loading it into memory. Sometime ago, the kernel team changed the get_user_pages() kernel API call. This meant that any code compiled against the old function definition failed. I encountered this in the professional space when the VMWare kernel modules failed to build and I hacked it until it worked. (They think I’m a wizard now). I was on Kernel 4.10 but the version of systemtap Ubuntu used was nearly 2 years old. This meant no one from the Ubuntu team was using it.

I submitted a bug report and installed Fedora 26.

SystemTap was developed by Red Hat and was trivial to get working under Fedora. And while not every single package is available (Bitcoin, Steam thus far), there is enough that moving over was trivial. Also, they come in Cinnamon, which I prefer, with a pretty theme. And it provides a clean terminal out-of-the-box. Which I need. (I would rather use stock XFCE if their terminal was clean than fully-loaded CentOS with an ugly terminal)

dnf took a little getting used to, but a hop-over from apt. So whatever on that front….

I would be willing to try OpenSUSE again, but the latest time I did, they got rid of /sbin/ifconfig for /sbin/ip, which is unacceptable. Silly, perhaps…Does it come in Cinammon? What does it offer? Are the packages as clean and up to date? I may never know, unless another business-need arises. I do not care to run any of these “hardware” distributions, like Arch. I paid my Linux dues around kernel 2.2 on Slackware and its time to move on from that.

But look, if you’re 99% of the Linux world, any specific distribution is trivial. Pick one and go with it. Unless you’re doing very specific tasks like me, it really does not matter what you use. So stop Distro Hoping!