Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?

> Stop spending time on things I don't care about

It's ok for people to waste time building stuff they think is cool. Did it need to be a distro? No but it also didn't need to exist. I'm glad it exists though, I think it really whips the llamas ass!

This attitude is why Linux based operating systems have such poor market share on the desktop. Opportunity costs are real. Friction is real. You don't see Windows creating a new OS for a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.

You don't see Windows themes at all.

I see it as one of the consequences of freedom, but perhaps also a gap in packaging where they can't bundle up their changes in a form to be applied onto another base.

That 'base' is one issue I've been thinking about with linux, I have similar concerns about the cost of everyone being able to make their own distro for their own slight variation on something else. It's not that I think it's a bad thing to pathfind in new areas, but the replication in building/supporting it all, getting users to pick between 4 similar variants of the same thing, and accounting for "you're using KustomLinux, which is 2 steps removed from CommonLinux" and all the little differences between them. It's an interesting contrast against standardization, but I can't help wondering how it would change the approachability of linux if the starting point was limited to one of the big distros and then variants are layered on top of that.

The reason Linux has poor desktop market share has nothing to do with a fun themed distro someone created as a side project.

> You don't see Windows creating a new OS for a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.

I'd also consider the behavior of both Windows and OSX to be a warning to avoid, and not an example to emulate.

But the line doesn't always have to go up with every breath everyone takes. It's ok to do stuff just because it's fun. Not every single action needs to increase market share.

I wouldn't call it an entirely new distro. It's just an Fedora image bundled with the necessary changes to create the UX. It doesn't provide its own software repositories. It's more like an unofficial Fedora Spin.

I agree. I've gone down the "make Linux look like Windows 95" path a couple times and while it's a fun yak shave, it's tough to get all the little changes and details right on one system, let alone your friend's system who want to play with the same DE for a day.

Why would the Linux ecosystem -- a diverse community of lots of different individuals and organizations all pursuing their own particular goals -- be singularly concerned with increasing desktop market share of Linux as a whole, and all pursue that in the exact same way?

I see, it still seems like the kind of project that would be much better suited to a DE packge-group style release. I think very few people will want to reinstall their OS just to try it.