Hacker News Reader

Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

If people stopped creating weird spinoff distros, which offer zero value except for a preconfigured Desktop, the entire Linux Desktop ecosystem would be in a far better place.

These distros focus on aesthetics choice, but underneath they are always plagued by the same things, tiny maintainer teams completely overwhelmed with the task of managing a distribution. Leading to a great first impression, but an inevitable breakdown in usability.

Every single person would be better served by Kubuntu than Zorin. Simply because Kubuntu has far superior backing behind it.

There are hundreds of these weird distros, targeting different audiences and they are all terrible, because none of them have the actual capabilities of maintaining their distro.

View on HN

A distro working out-of-the-box for a certain user group is not a weird spinoff. Some people love to economize time; a distro that takes care of exactly that is a good deal.

None of these distros economize time. This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration. Every single user of these distros is in the hands of a tiny number of developers who mostly work on this as a hobby. Things are going to break and they will break in ways nobody will know why, since the base distro does not have these problems.

There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.

Zorin is not a hobby distro. They are a small company that does this for profit. You may like or dislike that, but your assessment is wrong in this case.

> This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration.

Well yes it is. Zorin is literally based on Ubuntu LTS and their packages are binary compatible.

I think you have a typo. The arch forums don't want reports from arch derivative distros

I don't get why major distros like Kubuntu don't just add a nice looking default theme.

("nice looking" by the standards of the vast majority of people, not some small group of hackers to whom Windows 95 was the pinnacle of design.)

I think Kubuntu looks very reasonable and switching KDE themes is as simple as it gets.

Where I think you are right is that it would be very feasible to create a few different builds of e.g. Kubuntu which come with different presets or make those available during installation, with easy switching in the life desktop environment. Maintaining each one should be quite simple, as it is just a few packages, with some configuration on top.

This opinion is what’s holding Linux back. Having a clean and pleasant user experience on top of a stable Debian based distributed is the goal.

> Having a clean and pleasant user experience on top of a stable Debian based distributed is the goal.

That may be the goal for you personally but it certainly isn't the greater goal of Linux as a whole.

Exactly, you do that by installing Debian with KDE. Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain, which is then perpetually broken in weird ways, which no user can figure out since the base distribution does not have the problems the completely understaffed maintainers introduced.

What all of these distros want to be is a basic configuration script. What they are is a nightmare for every user, since the user is now in the hands of a few people, who as a hobby are maintaining his OS and occasionally will break it.

It is so bizarre that so many people want to make distros, when they are completely unequipped up do so.

It would be a really huge advantage if there were a really clean way to browse, apply, and (extremely importantly) reverse and remove such a configuration script. I've tried using KDE's customization options to tweak my desktop, and what I found is that I'm very capable of creating the worst desktop I've ever used.

Username checks out. Not everyone wants to use Debian stable, with 3 year old packages. And most certainly not everyone wants to use KDE. Choice is what makes the Linux ecosystem great even if it leads to fragmentation. Most distros are created by volunteers, what do you contribute?

It's not like Ubuntu LTS does not provide 3 year old packages as well. Other than that I agree

> Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain

Given the fact said distro is based on Ubuntu LTS there is very little to maintain except a set of themes and desktop customisation and default choices. The long support cycle makes it that the Zorin team is not facing major changes so often as they keep the same Gnome version for a long time. This is a perfectly decent sokution for people who do not feel the need to stay current with the latest version of any given desktop at all time.

You could also ask why XFCE does not use KDE in the background and just work on apps and provide their own KDE theme instead. They can't even make a wayland session in 2025 working so why bother? Or unity, mate, Pantheon from elemenetary os - why don't they just stick to being a theme on top of gnome or KDE and instead focus on the apps?

The answer is the same.

> Having a clean and pleasant user experience on top of a stable Debian based distributed is the goal.

This pretty much describes LMDE[1].

[1] https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

How else will you ship your desktop to less-technical end users? Convince Canonical to include it in Ubuntu by default? Every time you create a customized version of Linux that people can install out of the box, you are by definition creating a distribution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com