[cosmic_cheese]

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.

[johnny22]

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.

[beeflet]

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

[p1necone]

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.

[lelanthran]

> 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]

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]

Its JUST gnome thats blocking that protocol.

[HumanOstrich]

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/

[cosmic_cheese]

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.

[WD-42]

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?

[saint_yossarian]

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

[__aru]

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.

[theevilsharpie]

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.

[cosmic_cheese]

That’d still come with the limits brought by the old kernels Ubuntu ships.

Which as an aside, I think distros should advertise better. It must be awful to be sold on a distro only to find that it doesn’t support your newish hardware. A simple list of supported hardware linked on the features and download pages would suffice but a little executable tool that will tell you if your box’s hardware is supported would be even better.

[DaSHacka]

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?

[wiseowise]

Why don’t you do it?