I promise you, even if you base it on ubuntu you still don’t have the resources required.

And people don’t want more reskins that do the same thing but worse, like on android

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@alatiera

ok... Why do you think laptop manufacturers make their own downstream spins of debian/ubuntu/fedora etc?

@joao @alatiera In lots of cases, we used to call it "differentiation via finger painting"

@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".

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