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Comment by lytol | Hacker News Reader

What's the benefit/reasoning here for another distro? I just want rock-solid hardware with strong Linux compatibility. It seems like the man-hours would be better spent contributing to drivers to ensure stability and accessibility across all Linux distributions.

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Which is why the year of desktop Linux will never happen, because everyone wants to differentiate their product.

The way things went with netbooks and nowadays with Android, Jolla, Tizen,... shows what happens when OEMs try to sell Linux distributions.

I can clearly imagine Dell Linux, HP Linux, MS Linux, Huawei Linux, Samsung Linux, .... each with their own "value added" and update policies.

Dell has been pushing plain Ubuntu for a while I think.

Their 13 XPS laptops are always out of stock in Germany, so I never managed to try them out.

ASUS used to sell 1215B ones with Ubuntu on the German Amazon store, which I managed to get for travel purposes.

But in spite of those two examples, I don't see most OEMs would play ball regarding OEM distributions and updates.

Did this not work for Android? I seem to recall that every Android phone manufacturer shipped their own customized Android with different home screens, navigation, widgets, apps, etc. Did not stop consumers from buying the phones. Even today the number of Android phones released with stock Android each year is laughably low.

Not at all, unless you mean that the current situation of only getting updates when paying at least 800 € for 2 + 1 model is a good one.

Imagine getting a OEM Linux with such update model, using closed source drivers bound to the distribution kernel.

Well, this seems target users that are more interested in making something new - it had a strong developer/ advanced user message.

While I too find it a bit odd to call it OS I am very much in favour of doing UI research on distros like this instead of in Ubuntu default.

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