"Flavour" was always just a fragment of hacker slang which might just as well be applied to different editions of Microsoft Windows, different trim levels of Honda Civic, or whatever. It was more common in reference to linux distros when it was mostly only hackers who ran linux. There's an entry for "flavor" in the jargon file.
@youronlyone you described “flavor” exactly how I’ve seen the usage over my 20 years of Linux.
Flavor, to me, was a combination of the DE and the pre-installed package set. And different flavors were all part of one base distro (this reminds me that Debian, Red Hat, Slack were “base distros”for a time). Even Ubuntu was a flavor of Debian at the start, but quickly grew out from that to probably be its own base distro.
@raineer Ahh! I like that "base distro". Ubuntu is what made me confused since I've viewed it as a Flavor of Debian. Then I'm stuck what to call Kubuntu and Lubuntu. Unless I re-categorize Ubuntu as a distro, then she rest are flavors.
And then the forks! At least the forks are easier, it's just "fork". 😅
@youronlyone I feel like Ubuntu is now a "base distro derived from Debian", mainly because "base distro based on Debian" sounds weird :laugh:
I feel like it stopped being a "flavor" when the project got so large and started to push in a different ideological direction. The recent controversy over Snaps also reinforces that Ubuntu has done much more than just customize a DE and select certain packages, Canonical wants it to approach Linux management in a very specific way.
This leaves room for Kubuntu, Edubuntu, etc to be flavors of Ubuntu, which they certainly are.
But, this is all splitting hairs. Any interpretation is correct if the user understands it! :linux:
@youronlyone I think you might be slightly misremembering things.
Distro: Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, etc.
Flavor: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu (for Ubuntu); Mint's various "Editions", etc.
DE: Gnome, KDE, LDE, etc.
And the other major one you couldn't recall is likely the package manager (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.), which you might have mixed up a bit with your definition of Distro
I thought .deb and .rpm are the package managers of the projects.
With Flavors like Kubuntu and Lubuntu I assume its a "flavored" Ubuntu, so I would agree.
But it originated from Debian, so Ubuntu would be a flavor of Debian?
I'm thinking similarly that Ubuntu is a Flavor of Debian. But on the other hand, it's also a Distro be itself and have its own Flavors.
DE is Desktop Environment. In the early days, it was a heated battle between Gnome and KDE, and Flavors came out one after another based on those two.
I guess when Ubuntu came to the picture with their Kubuntu, Lubuntu, flavors, the importance of DE and Flavors eventually was forgotten. Now it's all about the Distro.
But we should probably archive these info before it's forgotten. Unfortunately, I'm not sure myself anymore how all of these terminologies were originally defined. 😅😅