>Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into Linux in general.

By "nice" do you mean a distro which is fundamentally broken and far less supported then its parent distro?

>It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.

It is displaying the worst that is out there, just with a nice interface. These niche distros are always the worst choices, because they lack in support and are all fundamentally broken.

Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.

The truth is that Linux is mostly stable (even Arch), well supported and maintained. But this does not apply to these small hobby projects, which are just worse versions of their base distros with some ricing on top.

>FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.

At the same time I am free to warn people against this. These distros are a bad Idea and especially if you are new to Linux they will make you suffer far more than you should.

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acron0 an hour ago | parent [-]

> Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.

Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of users moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever. What they're getting is a fresh, usable experience specifically in the "flavor" they care about.

Linux, and especially Arch, has an image problem, and it's the reason, despite how good these base distros might be, that people aren't coming. It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".

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constantcrying 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

>Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of users moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever.

Yes, but it will be experience they inevitably will have once these differences will result in their OS being fundamentally broken and nobody being there to help them.

>It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".

Hilariously giving people a fundamentally broken OS, which they use based on superficial criteria is the best gatekeeper imaginable. Once the inevitable happens and their distro is totally trashed, they will never use Linux for anything again.

If you want people to have a good long term experience give them a well supported mainstream distro, instead of a fundamentally broken arch patchset.

>"actually, maybe this is something I can use".

Which is exactly the wrong thought. No, the fundamentally broken Arch derivative you are trying to use is much, much harder to use than Fedora.

	▲	acron0 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But you won't get them to understand these points unless you're willing to fix the image problem and then invest in better branding. Telling people they're wrong doesn't sell things.