What a great article! I’ve been using linux for a few years now, but I don’t believe I have ever heard these terms defined. (This would have been super helpful when I was just trying to get my feet wet in Linux.)
Another term that always threw me for a loop was the constant reference of GTK or QT. NOW I get the general idea about them being different frameworks… or different paths to get to the end goal of an application running on the desktop. But when I was starting out, I couldn’t figure out why some applications looked so disjointed on some desktops, but on others, they fit right in.
One question rises from reading your article though… Its this matter of a ‘soft fork.’
IF Ubuntu is a soft fork of Debian (which sounds correct in my head) AND Ubuntu features newer packages and advanced hardware support… how then could it infrequently re-base its packages on later iterations of Debian (which is still on older packages).
Q: What am I mis-understanding still about soft-forks?
A good solid article, and I enjoyed the read. Its still taking me years to wrap my head around some of the Linux concepts.