ok... Why do you think laptop manufacturers make their own downstream spins of debian/ubuntu/fedora etc?
@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.
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".
@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".
@zachdecook @joao @alatiera that isn’t really what I would classify as “a spin”, though…