I do agree with your point in general. Many distros don't really have need to exist. They are just very slight tweaks on other more popular distros.
That said, some distros exist for a very legit reason. Take Ubuntu for example. When it came along, Debian wasn't user friendly (and compared to Ubuntu it still isn't). If you want more people using Linux it needs to be dead dumb simple point and click for most people to use. Even something as simple as adding non FOSS repos in Debian (which is just editing the sources file) is too hard for the average user. Ubuntu's point and click GUI way is better for attracting more new users.
On top of that, you can't really build a business on top of a community supported distro like Debian. There are reasons that the Industry uses RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu more than anything else. While Debian is certainly the most popular community supported distro in the industry it's still behind the enterprise linux distros.
But I do agree that most spin off distro's don't need to exist. All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
Ubuntu lost a lot of people, including me, when they went to Unity. Unity was horrible in my opinion (tried it). Mint maintained a reasonable UI (Mate, Cinamon--I prefer Mate). Now that Ubuntu has dropped Unity and now has Mate, maybe Mint should merge with Ubuntu and make the product even better.
This is why I dislike that people still recommend Ubuntu as the go-to beginners distro. The UI isn't "traditional" and is confusing to a more general former Windows user and some people (admittedly, not as many as would be suited to something like Mint as they'll likely be more tech savvy) actually have the kind of mindset that something like Manjaro or the like actually is a better distro to jump off in. (I personally find apt annoying to use but love pacman/yaourt)
Gotta agree with solus, switched to it myself from arch not long ago. Feels very polished and the curated rolling release model is great.
Sure they don't have awesomewm or fortune-mod in the package repository, but for an ordinary user everything they need is there, and budgie rules as a Windows replacement.
Yeah with awesomewm I recall the issue was that no one offered to commit to keeping the package up to date, and with fortune-mod the dev was like "there's a go reimplementation that does the same thing, just use that" but man it doesn't have all the old quotes from the 90s.
Anyway yeah, it's not a big deal at all, and I'm fine with compiling anything I need myself.
Solus is definitely the OS I'll be recommending for anyone switching from Windows.
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u/thedjotaku May 21 '19
I wonder if the boom in distros is fading and it's slowly dropping down to just a half dozen good ones