@ebassi

Since you did not said: "in all cases", can I assume that for you there can be cases in which there are valid reasons for a laptop manufacturer to make a spin of a distro?

If that is the case, what would be valid reasons for that?

@alatiera

@joao @alatiera I was being generous; in pretty much all the cases in which I was involved, OEMs tended to either adopt an existing distro (likely backed by a commercial entity rather than a community-driven one); or they went for their own OS, with its own points of differentiation—applications, UX, update mechanisms, etc.

Just re-skinning Ubuntu or Fedora isn't really a sustainable proposition: it's a lot of work for very little gain.

@ebassi @joao @alatiera I assume 'being able to test kernel updates before shipping them to your customers' is a big starting point.

@zachdecook @joao @alatiera that isn’t really what I would classify as “a spin”, though…

@ebassi

There are cases where hardware enablement or work with a specific framework is still necessary, for a reason or another before it can run an upstream distro out of the box. And in such cases having a spin, can be necessary to do that work before upstreaming.

Linux on mobile for the past 6 years comes to mind. (One Plus 6, Librem 5, pinephone, Volla phone)

But I am not sure if that falls into your category of a "spin".

@zachdecook @alatiera

@joao @zachdecook @alatiera Yeah, I wouldn't count a custom kernel package as "a spin"; hardware enablement should happen prior to release, in any case.

I classify as "a spin" something like: "taking Ubuntu and replacing the default desktop with something else"; or: "repackage upstream to have a different branding and visual identity through custom patches".