I would watch a YouTube series doing this

I “broke” linux mint just by trying to pop KDE on, had to timeshift because it messed up my keyboard layout and a whole bunch of other things with my display.

I don’t know how people do these crazy changes without pain, and have a feeling the answer is simply “there’s pain” 😂

I have seen dozens of systems migrated from Gentoo to CentOS by live swapping the userspace and eventually rebooting into the new kernel. A hair raising experience to be sure.

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

I can’t quite recall, but I think I did exactly that with Ubuntu -> Debian once upon a time. I think Ubuntu was only a year or so old though, so there wasn’t a huge amount of divergence back then. As a bonus anecdote I also attempted a semi-successful build of Gentoo on a PPC Mac around the same time (nothing before or after that has compared in its level of nightmare).

I once switched from Debian i386 to amd64 in-place. That was MUCH harder than you would expect, I guess somewhere between medium and hard in your list. That server is still running that install btw, so in the end it all worked out.

To add sadism on top of masochism, tell all your friends how you did it in great detail

May, I introduce you to bedrock

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.

It is quite easy to go slackware -> gentoo from what I remember but minimalist distros might be cheating

I’ve done the Arch to Artix. It wasn’t hard, per se, but it took a while. I think that should be Medium, because Artix isn’t just an Arch derivative.

In fact, might I suggest a different way of looking at the difficulties?

• Replacing the package manager: Hard.
• Replacing the package manager without a live USB: Extreme.
• Going from a basic systemd-based distro (init, log, cron) to anything else: Hard
• Going from a systemd distro that’s bought into the entire systemd stack, including home and boot: Extreme
• Going from one init to another: Medium
• Changing boot systems: grub to UEFI, for example: Easy.
• Replacing all GNU tools with other things: Extreme (mainly because of script expectations).

And so on. You get 1 point for Easy, 2 for Medium, 4 for Hard, and 8 for Extreme. Add 'em up, go for a high score.

I don’t think rolling your own is that hard, TBH, unless you’re expected to also build a package manager. If maintaining it would be harder than building it.

Is that even possible? I’m already in panic when I remove a package and it’s dependencies with pacman 😅.

Sure I did replaced Thunar with Nemo, but a few things don’t work exactly how it should, like opening the download directory from Firefox (Known issue BTW) even though all mime-types are correctly set !

Even switching from Alternative -> Base distro seems like a really difficult task :/

The compiled distros should be easy instead of nightmare tbh