Re:Pop OS 20.04 LTS
by dspillett on Thursday April 30, 2020 @10:20PM
(#23038490)
> clarified filesystem diff. I am thinking in real low level terms like what truly is the difference between these distributions
One way to do that would be to install each version of each variant you are interested in on a VM (of exactly the same config each time), script a filesystem scan that always outputs the same order and sends the result to a central area where you can do a simple text diff on the output or load the results into a db of some sort for deeper analysis. You could even automate it to an extent.
I'm not entirely sure what you'd learn of much use, and you won't learn the differences between matters of real hardware support, but it might be an interesting exercise anyway.
This would only really be useful for comparing similar distributions, i.e. Ubuntu variations of similar vintage. There is so much different between, say, Ubuntu and CentOS, or Ubuntu now and Ubuntu last year, that there are too many differences for a filesystem level compare like that to be meaningful at all.
One way to do that would be to install each version of each variant you are interested in on a VM (of exactly the same config each time), script a filesystem scan that always outputs the same order and sends the result to a central area where you can do a simple text diff on the output or load the results into a db of some sort for deeper analysis. You could even automate it to an extent.
I'm not entirely sure what you'd learn of much use, and you won't learn the differences between matters of real hardware support, but it might be an interesting exercise anyway.
This would only really be useful for comparing similar distributions, i.e. Ubuntu variations of similar vintage. There is so much different between, say, Ubuntu and CentOS, or Ubuntu now and Ubuntu last year, that there are too many differences for a filesystem level compare like that to be meaningful at all.