I made the unfortunate post about asking why people liked Arch so much (RIP my inbox I’m learning a lot from the comments) But, what is the best distro for each reason?
RIP my inbox again. I appreciate this knowledge a lot. Thank you everyone for responding. You all make this such a great community.
I just want to learn more about what are the differences between distros, so that they will be better or worse? Are all the distros having the same GNU/Linux kernel so that if I replace all the Arch userland files into Debian’s, the system will become Debian?
Yes. Different distros have different versions, patches and so on, but the underlying kernel is the same.
If by “userland” you mean files which your normal non-root user can touch, then no. There’s differences on how distributions build directory trees, file locations, binaries, versions and so on. You can of course replace all the files on the system and change distribution that way, a convenient way to do that is to use distros installer but technically speaking you can also replace them manually by hand (which I don’t recommend).