Comment this is idiotic. (Score 2, Insightful) 201
the proliferation of distros is just stupid - people don't seem to understand what "distro" means, or why they should be offering addons to an existing distro, rather than pretending that they are building a new OS.
the ONLY value a distro offers is in establishing a particular set of versions, with a modicum of consistency of config and hopefully some testing. none of them offer anything significant that is also distinctive - just slightly different versions of the same packages maintained by others and used by all the other distros. yes, apt vs rpm, so what? they're functionally equivalent.
the real point is really a matter of software engineering: forking a distro is bad, since it increases the friction experienced by source-code changes. streamOS (sic) people may be dilligent and honestly propagate their changes upstream, but fundamentally, they should really just be running an apt repo containing their trivially modded packages. sure, that may mean a different kernel, big whoopie (very little of user-space is sensitive to anything but huge kernel changes.)
but yeah: it wouldn't be very sexy to say "I've got a repo of 37 tweaked packages I call a brand new whizzy *OS*".