The Linux Ship of Theseus

1. pick any distro and install it.

2. Then, without installing another distro over the top of it, slowly convert it into another distro by replacing package managers, installed packages, and configurations.

System must be usable and fully native to the new distro (all old packages replaced with new ones).

No flatpaks, avoid snaps where physically possible, native packages only.

EDIT: Some clarification on some of the clever tools brought up here:

chroot, dd, debootstrap, and partition editors that allow you to install the new system in an empty container or blanket-overwrite the old system go against the spirit of this challenge.

These are very useful and valid tools under a normal context and I strongly recommend learning them.

You can use them if you prefer, but The ship of Theseus was replaced one board at a time. We are trying to avoid dropping a new ship in the harbor and tugging the old one out.

It may however be a good idea to use them to test out the target system in a safe environment as you perform the migration back in the real root, so you have a reference to go by.

Easy: pick two similar distros, such as Ubuntu and Debian or Manjaro and Arch and go from the base to the derivative.

Medium: Same as easy but go from the derivative to the base.

Hard: Pick two disparate distros like Debian and Artix and go from one to the other.

Nightmare: Make a self-compiled distro your target.

Additionally, it appears that the code for the backend server is intended to be public as well, but just doesn't exist outside of a readme.md document in the main branch.

This is setting off sirens, particularly the lack of a license.

If you would like to contribute, please consider making a fork of the repo and updating the language strings for your native language. Take care not to change the actual variable names (i.e. leave the word "reddit" and "subreddit" in the variable tags, but change the actual string values).

The languages are available in this folder here, in the various values-... folders:

https://github.com/bqv/slide/tree/lemmy/app/src/main/res

If you'd like to see my commit as an example of what I did to base yours off of, you can see it here:

https://github.com/bqv/slide/pull/2/commits/f346de0ef40b3fb87a9d420d969f2f16edc874a5

If you are coming over from Reddit, welcome back to the switchroot community! Remember, this is not an official community ran by the official developers, I do this in my spare time. Go to the discord (linked in the sidebar) for the official community.