The Linux Ship of Theseus
-
pick any distro and install it.
-
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.
Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 10 April 2025 at 05:46 AM EDT. 12 Comments RADEON Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now exposing its emulated ray-tracing support by default for older AMD Radeon GPUs even without any form of hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in order to run the new Indiana Jones game. It turns out even the emulated RT mode is fast enough to allow various older AMD Radeon graphics cards to be playable with this title.
Natalie Vock has landed the change to expose the emulated Vulkan ray-tracing extensions by default when running Indiana Jones and The Great Circle "TGC". Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was released for Windows back in December and powered by the Motor Engine. It requires ray-tracing support but it turns out RADV's emulated support is good enough for allowing older GPUs to enjoy this action-adventure game.
Indiana Jones The Great Circle logo
Vock explained in the merge request:
AMD GFX8 is for the Polaris GPUs along with Volcanic Islands and Arctic Islands. Amazing to see AMD Radeon RX 480/580 Polaris GPUs still working for newer games on Linux.
This change is now in Mesa 25.1-devel while those on current Mesa releases with older Radeon GPUs can always set the RADV_PERFTEST=emulate_rt environment variable to achieve the same behavior.