Zipf's law is an empirical law that often holds, approximately, when a list of measured values is sorted in decreasing order. It states that the value of the nth entry is inversely proportional to n. The best known instance of Zipf's law applies to the frequency table of words in a text or corpus of natural language. Namely, it is usually found that the most common word occurs approximately twice as often as the next common one, three times as often as the third most common, and so on. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences. True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words, followed by "and". This "law" is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, and is still an important concept in quantitative linguistics.
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11/07/2025

DISTRO WARS

Gotta love scaring away all the normal people by starting out a blog with a niche technical topic.

Let’s start from the beginning, what the hell is Linux? Linux is a lightweight family of operating systems based on the Linux kernel, which is based on Unix (what modern Apple products run on). Linux, however, is open-source. This means people can fork it and make their own version.You know how in Protestantism there is like a bazillion different distinct sects? Some of them look are easy to confuse with the Catholic church they split apart from, such as Lutherans. Others have strange, exotic or even bizarre practices, such as rock and roll sermons. Linux is a bit like that. There’s Linux that runs on microcomputers, Linux that powers Russian submarines, Linux that controls server infrastructure, gamer Linux, hacker Linux, Linux for paranoid people, etc. Those different ‘flavours’ of Linux are called distributions or ‘distros’ for short.

Because Linux is niche and encourages user cooperation, this ends up creating an actual community. Where there is community, there is drama. Go on any Linux subreddit or forum or Youtube comment section and you will find people arguing which distro is the best. To a newcomer, it’s almost impossible to pick a version of Linux to start with because there are so many different versions. To boil it down, there’s essentially three main camps.

First is Ubuntu and its derivatives. Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux. It’s popular, has a lot of drivers, comes with an office suite and is user friendly. The issue is that it’s been introducing features over the years that make it seem a bit too much like Windows, which is scaring off more experienced users. Second group is Debian and its children. Debian is the distribution that runs most server infrastructure on the planet. If a firm or government uses Linux, they are likely using Debian because it’s stable and works well enough with most drivers. The joke about Debian users is that they are running a year-old Firefox version because the system updates only when it absolutely needs to. The most popular child of Debian is a distribution known as Linux Mint, which is a Windows-like operating system for beginners and office workers. Lastly there is Arch Linux. To put it bluntly, Arch Linux users are the vegans of the Linux community. The reason why they have such a massive ego is because Arch Linux is the “do-it-yourself” operating system. You start out with a terminal and have to assemble the actual operating system from the ground up. The only derivative of Arch is called Manjaro. Personally, it was quite horrible to use, but it had better drawing pen drivers than those on Windows for some reason. There’s also countless others that I haven’t mentioned, for example Gentoo which legendarily hard to setup or various joke OS’s such as Hannah Montana Linux.


Anyway, there’s two major differences between the different distributions. First is the software packages you start out with. Some start you out with a browser, gaming drivers, text editors an app store, etc. Others just plop you in the middle of a white on black terminal and ask you to figure it out yourself. Second are the level of customisation you can achieve with each OS. If I’m not mistaken, Arch allows you to make changes up to kernel level. Mint or Ubuntu have extensive settings, but it’s far more ‘put together’ and you need to jump through hoops to make it modular.

So, uh, which is the best one? Honestly, most distributions can work well after some adjustment. Personally, I’m a Linux Mint user. It’s considered to be a beginner OS, but I genuinely haven’t found a good reason to switch it since stuff just works. There is a distribution for graphic designers and artists, but you can just copy its packages onto your OS and use what you like. You really have to ask yourself what do you use your computer for. Not to throw any more shade at Arch users, but most people simply do not need to make a bunch of scripts for the vast majority of tasks. Arch is great if you want to tinker with your computer indefinitely, but it lacks stability.



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This is my blog where I share my thoughts about game development, art or technology. Most of these come out late and night, so don't expect this to be too serious.

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