Derivative Distros Create Worse Problems than they Solve. -Distro-Hopping Madness!

They inherit upstream problems AND add their own. Every time I made a distro review, this issue came up. Derivative distros start with upstream bugs, packaging decisions, regressions, and kernel quirks. To this, it adds its own repos, patches, theming, installer, and 'vision'.

"It's upstream." "It's downstream." "It's your hardware." "It's your config."

-Nobody owns the problem.

Every derivative distro needs package and kernel maintainers, security patchers, release managers, QA testers, documentation writers, and community support, yet most derivatives have a mere 1-5 hobbyists, a chat room, a github repo, and a dream.

-More distros than maintainers.

Each derivative moves settings, renames tools, changes defaults, rebrands utilities, and alters system paths. Documentation becomes unreliable between them.

Most derivative distros exist because someone didn’t like a theme, DE choice, package selection, default app, or branding decision. -The underlying issues like driver instability, DE fragmentation, inconsistent standards, and ABI churn remain.

-It's like Bondo for a car.

Linux already sucks from too many DEs, package formats, init systems, audio stacks, display servers, and distros. -It's not even debated. Users end up with decision fatigue while the evangelists champion 'freedom'.

Instead of one distro getting 10,000 testers (and supporters), you get 500 on the parent, 200 on the child, 50 on the remix, and 10 on the remix-of-the-remix. Bugs scatter across forums, GitHub issues, Reddit threads, and chats. Telephony comes into play as users ask questions instead of search.

-Upstream never sees half of them, downstream can't fix the other half, and everyone blames everyone else.

Every derivative tweaks something: Kernel, Mesa, PipeWire, Systemd, packaging rules, patches, themes, permissions. -This makes it more difficult for software vendors to support Linux.

-Commercial Linux support is always "Ubuntu 22.04 or GTFO."

Many derivative distros copy features without understanding them: Btrfs snapshots, ZRAM, custom kernel, or performance patch and then don't maintain them, test them, or understand them. Most of those 'performance' patches make humanly unnoticeable differences while causing increased unreliability which is why upstream with their better manpower and knowledge base didn't implement them!