When my desktop pc was new, it was too new to have support from Linux Mint, which has been installed on every single one of my dilapidated laptops since 2011, so I decided to install Manjaro and have stuck to it for two years.

imho minimal installers are fine , you need net to do nearly anything lately anyway

Then you'd really like slax. It's like 250Mb (350 if lzo) and apt-get just about anything you want.

I'd kinda prefer if there was a joint effort where bundles of software (source and binary) was on a disc, then you have the distros where it says which packages and you insert disc 1 & 3 to get it all, and anything that can't be covered from the disc's is covered by the distro, generally configurations, custom kernels, etc... Think about distros going down to 3Mb and building on the fly at home...

imho there should be maybe 3 distros max, then each should have packages for styles and apps you can install
so you would just install a base linux then run one of these , linux would be much better

The simplicities would be easier and better yes, but i was just meaning packages in general and not distro-level of choices. Not Gnome vs GTK vs XFCE, etc, packages more like CD burning software, Office, games, browsers, things that shouldn't care which windowing manage you're using as much as possible.

yeah , that would be good too
at least they should all switch to systemd for start and wayland

Problems with this:
* systemd is, even looking at a minimal cut-down version, still bigger than the likes of sysvinit, or better, busybox init (or no init at all). This matters when your RAM is a handful of megabytes (like in some embedded Linux systems)..
* There's a lot of "legacy" software out there that uses X11, and adding Wayland to such a system (and using XWayland for the legacy app) would require more memory, which again can be a problem for the low amounts of RAM found in embedded systems. Also, there may not be a Wayland driver that works on the system, yet there may be an Xorg driver. (Also, some apps can actually write directly to the framebuffer, bypassing Xorg/Wayland entirely.)

So, for some embedded systems, systemd and Wayland may not be options.

(This is the sort of reason why it makes sense to have a variety of distributions; there are use cases that aren't handled by the most popular ones.)

Arch. I like the rolling release. Everything stays up to date, and I never have to go through the upgrade or reinstall process. My current Arch install is from 2012. I don't. I've mostly used Linux exclusively since 2006. There have been a couple times since then that I went back to dual booting for brief periods, but both times, dual booting was more frustration than it was worth. Honestly, no advantages. Disadvantages of wasting hard drive space, intricacies of sharing files between two OS's, more complicated bootloader setup, and the wasted time of switching from one to the other. Advantages of no wasted space, simpler setup, no problems trying to share files. I never truly learned how to use Linux until I ditched Windows. So, if you want to learn Linux, throw away the safety blanket, and dive in. Yes. In the past it was frustratingly unstable in terms of regressions. It always felt as if every game that they made work, broke two other games that used to work. This is largely behind us now, and the recent releases have generally just worked. It can. This is more of a historic thing, unless your using something obscure. I haven't had any hardware/driver issues in many years. Don't know. I've never used it.

Thank you for the recommendation. I won't be using snapstore features until I learn enough.
I was reading that it's also 'dangerous' for the system to use PPA libraries, is that true?

The danger here would be equivalent to installing 'windows .exe's' from untruthful sources?

Package maintenance is a blessing in Linux compared to Windows, thus I see your point. Really nice. This is good for backups it seems, the price is storage size though.

So you can build custom distros, based in 'official distros' with pre installed apps just like Android with root?

Thank you for your answer too.
I kinda agree with you and with everyone else that said Dual Boot is kinda annoying.
As I said earlier, Im doing Dual Boot right now, almost ditching Windows completely.
File management with two systems feels weird.

Talking about WINE, I tested it with two windows games (GOG versions: Cyber Hook and Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen).

Cyber Hook played well, with some arctifacts in ground textures, and some fps loss.
DDDA played really well, no graphical issues, but with constant stutters and fps loss in effect-heavy situations.

--

Thanks everyone for the answers. They're really helpful.

The main problem with PPAs is that there's no central repository or authority for them. Nobody can vet them or say their build is still valid, much like Fedora's COPR or the famous Arch AUR.

As for your second question, let me put it this way: My install of Fedora, I chose the KDE Spin to start with that desktop. I no longer have that installed, and yet the system is still functional. As long as the kernel and shell are intact, you can morph into whatever you want.

(Within some sanity limitations.)

You are going to need an init system, or at least some executable binary, in /sbin/init, or else the system will not boot. (Actually, if initramfs booting fails, the kernel does check a few other places, including /bin/sh.)

Using /bin/sh as an init system is a rather fragile setup that should only be done in emergencies; if the user exits that shell, the kernel will panic.

(Strictly speaking, all you really need is a kernel and a statically linked application that runs as PID 1; no shell required. That application can be in the initramfs (meaning no filesystem access is needed after boot) or it can be on a filesystem the kernel knows how to mount.)

Thank you once again for your answers and explanation.

Searching for ways to optmize said problems, I've found Lutris, but it's installation requires their "ppa:lutris-team/lutris".
Their community seems huge and truthtful, but, are they?
How can we analize if said "ppa authority" is worthy of community trust?

ofc i didnt talk about embedded systems, so just this talk is just for desktops and for those the only thing applies is not every app supports wayland yet , but it should be a few lines of code change i suspect

By the way, I noticed a change in the behavior of removing the systemd-sysv package from a debian/systemd system.

* Previously, the package sysvinit-core would be installed. In other words, doing this would switch the init system to sysvinit.

* Now, doing so will remove init entirely, provided you type the message it asks you to type (feature to prevent accidental sever breakage). The result is no init system at all, meaning that you have a system that doesn't boot. This can be useful in situations like chroots or some containers where no init system is needed, or if you've written your own init system, but otherwise this creates an unbootable system (hence why you have to type a message to explicitly confirm this is what you want).

Edit: If you explicitly want sysvinit as your init system, install the sysvinit-core package. (This will remove systemd-sysv; that's supposed to happen, and is the package to install if you want to switch back to systemd.)