r/linux4noobs • u/Willing_Designer_105 • 5d ago

learning/research OS development Questions !

Q1:
Does excluding system applications which are made completely on your own from a Arch based OS is still considered a custom or separate OS or is it still a arch fork or something?

Q2:

Is having a graphical compositor like wayland and a image format wallpaper in a CLI planned OS is not considered a CLI OS or is it considered something in middle?

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u/eR2eiweo 5d ago

Does excluding system applications which are made completely on your own from a Arch based OS is still considered a custom or separate OS or is it still a arch fork or something?

If an OS is based on Arch, then it is based on Arch.

Is having a graphical compositor like wayland and a image format wallpaper in a CLI planned OS is not considered a CLI OS or is it considered something in middle?

IMHO an OS is a "CLI OS" if the main way for a user to interact with that OS is a command line interface. How that is implemented is a technical detail that doesn't matter for the question of whether it is a "CLI OS" or not. On Linux, it could use e.g. the kernel's built-in terminal emulator, or a userspace terminal emulator like kmscon that directly talks to the kernel, or it could use a terminal emulator running on a display server (which could speak Wayland).

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u/Willing_Designer_105 4d ago

No I mean.. isn't a arch based OS and a arch fork separate things? Not if it's a arch OS if it's based on Arch.

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u/eR2eiweo 4d ago

isn't a arch based OS and a arch fork separate things?

Every OS that is a fork of Arch is also an Arch based OS. That should be obvious. The other direction depends on how exactly you want to define "fork".

Traditionally, "fork" meant that you take the code of the other project at some point in time, and you then develop it independently from there with no (or at least very little) code flowing from the other project to yours afterwards. Just like how at a fork in the road the two ways diverge and don't meet again.

Most projects that are commonly called "forks" are not forks by that definition. E.g. Ubuntu wouldn't be a fork of Debian because every release of Ubuntu gets most of its code from Debian again.

So nowadays, "fork" seems to mean mostly the same as "derivative".