Here's an exercise in extreme masochism:

[semperverus@lemmy.world]

Oh I totally believe that. I can imagine how stressful that is.

This challenge is meant to be a bit different though, it's supposed to be more of a "Linux Ship of Theseus." Chroot, debootstrap, and dd are all very efficient ways to get the job done, but they're basically just dropping a new ship in the harbor and tugging the old one out.

[diamond@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

kid named nixos-infect:

[framexx@discuss.tchncs.de]

You are kind of right. I should have though about that before commenting.

[earlgrey@discuss.tchncs.de]

So, any distro to any other distro?

• Installs Fedora Silverblue
• Rebases to Bazzite

Jobs done chief!

[umbrella@lemmy.ml]

.

[semperverus@lemmy.world]

As other commenters have said, its about as strenuous as doing two normal installs.

However, if you want to do this challenge but feel guilty about the consumed resources, consider donating to the two distros you are performing this with to cover any additional service costs. In all likelihood it'll be fractions of pennies, but any reason to donate to FOSS is always appreciated.

[semperverus@lemmy.world]

The beauty of this exercise is you can make it as easy or challenging as you want just by changing the targets, and finding different combinations can keep things interesting.

[gashead76@lemmy.world]

I had forgotten about doing that myself. I did that on a couple servers once the distros had full 64 bit builds. Does that technically count as an architecture swap in-place as well?

[deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz]

Theoretically one could also prohibit rebooting.

IIRC kexec is pivot_root but for the kernel.

[beardedgingerwonder@feddit.uk]

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

[Guest]

Reminds me of trying NsCDE… it changed a ton of settings and no other desktop looked right after that. I ended just blowing away my home folder and restoring my files

[steeznson@lemmy.world]

The compiled distros should be easy instead of nightmare tbh

[sockpuppetsociety@lemm.ee]

This is what I was doing with my server. I've learned there's no better feeling than starting from scratch.

[limelight79@lemm.ee]

Ummm you go first.

[Guest]

May, I introduce you to bedrock

[overspark@feddit.nl]

Absolutely, that's basically the same thing

[madagaskar_sky@lemmy.world]

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

[mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org]

Okay i'll cheat with Guix then

[semperverus@lemmy.world]

After completing the challenge and making sure your system is usable and can survive a reboot:

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. Then delete itm

[nicolahaskell@lemmy.ml]

without installing another distro over the top of it ... [replace] package managers

The package manager is the distro, though.

$ pacman -S apk-tools
$ apk add alpine-base linux-lts

Then kexec to alpine's kernel and the initramfs generated by its installation (which would incidentally "replace" PID 1 with the new /sbin/init). For clean up you could take a diff of "tar -t" for all the installed packages from both distros then delete the files only in the old distro's packages.

Make a self-compiled distro your target.

Replace the first step with a compilation of apk, abuild everything required by alpine-base and linux-lts (git clone aports to bootstrap that work), then add the package directory to /etc/apk/repositories before the second step. Next, begin to worry that you haven't fully broken free yet, replace abuild with a bespoke mybuild and apk with tar -x, grapple with signed binaries, reflect on your own identity and authenticity, then take a tour through gentoo and find yourself missing the $HOME you left and its familiar comforts.