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Comment by mprev | Hacker News Reader

Is it really a distro? Surely a distro is a collection of tools, applications, and a kernel that form an operating system.

Haiku is a single project operating system, so when they make a release it's not a distribution as such, is it?

We wouldn't call Windows 10 a Windows distro.

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> We wouldn't call Windows 10 a Windows distro.

Actually, that's a kinda interesting question; I think what makes a distro is that it's a combination of components, right? So FreeBSD isn't a distro, it's one single thing. But GhostBSD is a distro, because it takes a base OS and bundles it with packages and tweaks to make it a nice GUI system. So does the existence of Windows LTSC and [Windows] Server Core (or even Nano) not imply that Windows is a distro? They all take the NT base OS, and pack on various components to build different versions of the "Windows" product family. Or is that more like adding sets to a BSD; just because you can include or exclude the X tarball doesn't make OpenBSD not a single system. Maybe the distinction is who's making it; Windows isn't a distro because it's all Microsoft's parts; a GNU/Linux distro, in contrast, is a patchwork of parts from different organizations.

Technically, all the BSDs are distributions. That's what the "D" in BSD stands for. Historically they were distros of UNIX.

Edit: typos

Technically yes that is in the name, but it's like a "cellphone" being a small computer that may or may not make phone calls; BSD was indeed a distro (or at least patchset) on top of Unix™, but modern BSDs aren't distros in that sense.

Haiku considers itself the one true distro of Haiku.

https://www.haiku-os.org/community/guidelines_creating_haiku...

Oh how I wish there were Windows distros

ReactOS[1]?

[1] https://reactos.org/

There are (not legal to be distributed publicly though) and you can make one yourself.

Jim Salter has been doing a series of Linux distro reviews, so the title ties into that, even if Haiku being a BeOS distro (or Haiku distro?) is a little questionable.

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