What seperates a fraken-debain from a respin?

[rgif]

When does tinkering with a system change it from a "respin" to a fraken-debian? Is it just when things break? I've made a list of modifications and I'm not sure if it's worth posting as a respin or if it's just a disaster waiting to happen.

Modifications are:
- liquorix kernel
- Systemd
- Btrfs with snapper snapshots and rollback (works just like spiral linux does)
- Ran the parrot convert script and then pinned the repos so that the tools are avaiable but don't override MX defaults
- Added trixie ( I know, big no-no) and installed gnome 48. (works fine) also pined the repo.


So is any of that worth posting as a respin? Or is it missing the point?

[AVLinux]

Hi,

Most Respins stay within the officially supported MX Repos, you're a step or two beyond that and you're in Franken territory but you seem to know what you're doing as as far as pinning etc.. To me the riskiest thing is the Trixie based Gnome which will have pulled in a lot of underlying Trixie depends.

Trixie and MX-25 is probably not all that far away so you could just wait a bit and make a Gnome Respin on MX-25 with those other changes, in the meantime you could Respin what you have as an alpha or RC release with the disclaimer it's not for production and then use the Feedback you get to do a final release on MX-25?

[dreamer]

I would say as long as you know what you are doing you can do whatever you want. If you intend to share it with others just list the modifications clearly and it's up to them to decide if they think it is for them or not. Just don't call it MX Linux if it isn't. Adding a Trixie repo to MX-23 is frankendebian IMO, but could still work to some extent.

I was working on a respin of Debian Trixie with LXQt. The reason for Debian Trixie is that I didn't want to wait for MX-25 Beta. Things went really well until it was time to take a snapshot. First Systemback failed to produce solid iso images. Then I tried with MX Snapshot, but didn't get it to boot to login in VBox.

Now I have to wait for MX devs to work their magic so I can use a Linux base that can be reliably snapshotted.

[asqwerth]

In my personal view, you can't really call it a "respin" of MX if it's no longer based on the base MX release. "Spin" generally would be taken to mean you are re-interpreting, or putting your own "spin", on the standard MX release.

Once you add binary incompatible repos and packages and have therefore moved to a totally different Debian base, it's no longer based on MX23. The qt and gtk versions may not even be the same anymore.

[siamhie]

A respin (in simple terms) would be taking an official release (XFCE, KDE,fluxbox) and adding a different desktop to it to make it the default desktop.


A FrankenDebian would be taking an official release and adding Debian's testing/sid repos to your apt sources.

[DeepDayze]

A respin (in simple terms) would be taking an official release (XFCE, KDE,fluxbox) and adding a different desktop to it to make it the default desktop.


A FrankenDebian would be taking an official release and adding Debian's testing/sid repos to your apt sources.

Not just that but adding say Ubuntu's repos for example. That alone will break Debian.

[siamhie]

A respin (in simple terms) would be taking an official release (XFCE, KDE,fluxbox) and adding a different desktop to it to make it the default desktop.


A FrankenDebian would be taking an official release and adding Debian's testing/sid repos to your apt sources.

Not just that but adding say Ubuntu's repos for example. That alone will break Debian.

The link I posted mentions that.

Repositories that can create a FrankenDebian if used with Debian Stable:

Debian testing release (currently trixie)
Debian unstable release (also known as sid)
Ubuntu, Mint or other derivative repositories are not compatible with Debian!
Ubuntu PPAs and other repositories created to distribute single applications

[DeepDayze]

Another sort of FrankenDebian would be mixing even other Debian derivative repos too not just the ones mentioned.

[asqwerth]

Another sort of FrankenDebian would be mixing even other Debian derivative repos too not just the ones mentioned.

I think if they're binary compatible repos, I wouldn't consider it a real frankendebian for the purposes of ascertaining if something is a respin or not.

Examples:, when members add Debian 12-compatible repos in order to have trinity DE in their respin, or when they add the latest installable cinnamon DE from LMDE Debian 12-compatible repos to their respins.

[dreamer]

Another sort of FrankenDebian would be mixing even other Debian derivative repos too not just the ones mentioned.

I think if they're binary compatible repos, I wouldn't consider it a real frankendebian for the purposes of ascertaining if something is a respin or not.

Examples:, when members add Debian 12-compatible repos in order to have trinity DE in their respin, or when they add the latest installable cinnamon DE from LMDE Debian 12-compatible repos to their respins.

Since I have nothing better to do I might as well split some hairs and point out that there is a noticeable difference. Trinity devs package for Debian. These are repos made to be added to vanilla Debian. Maybe they will replace your display manager with the TDE display manager, but you are probably given a choice.

Mint devs package for Mint. Their packages will (if not selected carefully) change your distro name to LMDE and your GRUB theming to Mint. There is a package called debian-system-adjustements from LMDE that should be avoided along with their GRUB theming. There are also other packages like mint-sources that are best avoided.

MX devs package more cleanly than Mint devs. My favorite distro would probably be LMDE userland on an MX base with all the MX tools. This is what I have installed on hardware, but it takes time to get it right.

A quicker option is to start with LMDE and install all the MX tools. But then MX Snapshot won't work so it's a no-go for me. MX Snapshot is what ties me to an MX base, otherwise a systemd-only base would be fine for my use case.

In an ideal world every distro dev would be a Debian maintainer and just maintain a version in Debian and maybe feed new versions into Sid. I know it isn't that easy... I think that's why PPAs were such a success back in the day. What I'm saying is that a potential Cinnamon PPA would be cleaner than pulling Cinnamon from Mint. Trinity repo is basically a PPA for Debian.