Agreed. I'm surprised by the amount of Linux newcomers being directed toward these weird, specialized derivatives that have existed >2 years.

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cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.

Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.

Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.

Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.

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johnny22 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.

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beeflet 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

okay but this should just be upstreamed into a real distro, we don't need 1000 distros that are all reimplementing the same thing

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p1necone 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

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lelanthran 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

What do you mean "PC Gamers"?

It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".

So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.

Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.

	▲	wincy an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I remember what got me to reinstall Windows after running Ubuntu for a week or two several years ago was they switched from Xorg to Wayland and I literally couldn’t watch movies because they switched over without Wayland supporting this? It was absolutely bonkers to me and soured me from Linux for years. I’ve administered thousands of Linux boxes but it’s a totally different ball game.
	▲	AuthAuth 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Its JUST gnome thats blocking that protocol.

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cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.

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WD-42 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?

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theevilsharpie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Debian -- probably not, but Ubuntu has numerous variants whose primary purpose is providing a different desktop experience, and a SteamOS-like variant would fit in perfectly with that.

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saint_yossarian 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't that just Steam's Big Picture mode?

	▲	__aru 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's an entire login session, steam game mode runs BPM via the game scope compositor, no desktop is loaded in the background, etc. The Steam client also enables hardware controls not available in traditional BPM. You can look up gamescope-session for more info. Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.

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HumanOstrich 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They don't keep separate packages for fun. Many of the changes would not be accepted to an upstream.[1] That's usually why the derived distro exists in the first place. Imagine arguing that Ubuntu should just be upstreamed into Debian.

[1]: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/

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DaSHacka 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ideally, this would be the best solution, but what happens when the upstream distro packagers disagree with the vision of one of these downstream distro maintainers?

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brendyn 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.