I recently ran across SpiralLinux - GitHub page, and found the concept of how the maintainer is packaging it very cool.
The maintainer has been maintaining Gecko Linux for a while now - it has the same underlying concept.
The gist is - you're basically installing Debian, but with customizations that the maintainer(s) thought would be very helpful. Basically - better out of the box experience for new users, but also less work to do even for experienced users, and it comes with different download flavors - Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Mate, etc.
Bit more detail by the maintainer in this Reddit comment:
Exactly. It's like I went over to your house and installed and configured Debian on your computer, and then you kicked me out of your house as soon as I finished. ;-) The installed system no longer has any connection whatsoever with me or the SpiralLinux project, which is good because you wouldn't want your entire system to depend on a random single developer maintaining it.
(original Reddit comment has more details).
I thought this was pretty cool. I'm still trying to read up online on trying to find how the package lists are maintained, etc., and I might be interested in contributing if I'm able to in the future.
Just wanted to share!
Hi there, thanks! For my personal needs and for the users that I support, it's important that the system not be a rolling release, and the Cinnamon desktop works extremely well for almost all use cases. SUSE and openSUSE are trying to move away from the conventional Linux OS paradigm and transition to a new buzzword-compliant immutable/atomic-updating/containerized OS, and they're going to pull the plug on openSUSE Leap in the not-too-distant future. For users that need/want a rolling distro I still think that Tumbleweed is the best option out there, but unfortunately Cinnamon has been unmaintained for almost 2 years in Tumbleweed and it's currently broken despite my attempts to submit updated packages. So I'm not going to invest time into updating the GeckoLinux Rolling ISOs until/unless the Cinnamon desktop is fixed and properly maintained for openSUSE Tumbleweed, and since Leap is going away I have dropped the Static and NEXT editions from GeckoLinux and recommend SpiralLinux for users that don't need a rolling release.
Yeah, it's a shame that Leap is supposed to go away (I think it's not entirely decided yet, is it? It depends whether some people want to offer a Leap-like solution or not in the future). Tumbleweed is super great, but it's not for every usecase...
Well, yes, in theory a group of people could offer a Leap-like distro in the future. But that's a big if, because even now with SUSE doing the lion's share of the heavy lifting in SLE there are very few contributors to Leap. And those are only for additional Leap community packages, as the core of Leap is a binary copy of SLE. It's very important to note that SUSE itself will be de-emphasizing SLE as a sort of legacy product in maintenance mode for long contracts, and they will aggressively push customers toward ALP. So as I see it, SUSE's plans are considerably more radical than all of the drama at Redhat, because Redhat is still focusing on RHEL as its core product and is planning future major releases. Although they made it more difficult for the clones, the upstream product is still there. Whereas SUSE is actually trying to move its core upstream product to something completely different. So a theoretical Leap replacement would have to take on a huge burden of maintaining the entire core system with no upstream to base it on (unless they use SUSE's clone of RHEL as the base, which would be a weirdly convoluted thing from a conceptual viewpoint). It looks like the more likely openSUSE offering to replace Leap will be a LTS offering known as "Linarite", but its upstream will be ALP, not SLE, and its scope will probably be mainly for servers. As you say, nothing is certain yet. But that's actually the biggest issue for me, when we talk about the "stability" of a distro we're not just referring to "not crashing"; a big part of "stability" is predictability and long-term viability. It feels like SUSE is going through a midlife crisis, and they seem to recognize that the move to ALP is a gamble. I don't like feeling as if my desktop OS or worse still my server OS is on life support and I'll eventually have to migrate it to something completely different. So I appreciate the slow plodding predictability of Debian, and knowing that it will still be there for me and work approximately the same for the N+1 release and probably the N+10 release as well.