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

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567 points elvis70 | 1 comments | 30 Mar 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mfro ◴[30 Mar 25 16:30 UTC] No.43525382[source]▶
Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?
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grayhatter ◴[30 Mar 25 17:15 UTC] No.43525770[source]▶
> 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!

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charcircuit ◴[30 Mar 25 19:06 UTC] No.43526637[source]▶
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.
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keyringlight ◴[30 Mar 25 20:30 UTC] No.43527359[source]▶
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.

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1. accrual ◴[31 Mar 25 04:26 UTC] No.43531016[source]▶
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.