As long as people think that a largely volunteer run ecosystem can be held to the very same expectations as products from some of the most wealthy companies on the planet without willingness to contribute or accept setbacks, I'm very glad that Linux isn't mainstream.

Ok, choose your battle then.

Is it your intention to communicate effectively with me in this conversation or is it not?

Just because politics the phenomenon involves subjective opinions doesn't mean the definition of the term is somehow subjective, or at least not any more or less subjective than any other term.
Opinions are subjective, but we still all pretty much agree what an opinion is and what isn't. Because while opinions are subjective, the term "opinion" isn't.

This is literally the basis of human communication. If things and terms didn't more or less mean the same thing for different speakers, we would be unable to communicate with each other.

If terms were generally completely subjective and up to the individual, there would be no point in you talking with me, or anyone else, because you could never be sure if who you are talking to even remotely means the thing that you think they mean.

And what exactly do you call navigating different opinions and proposals for actions in a community setting? That is LITERALLY politics.

Yes, people can have different opinions on what is political, but that doesn't mean those are equally valid. Politics has a clear definition. People can have different opinions in politics, but not really about what is politics.

From wiki:
"Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status."

Saying they don't want to do politics, while making a literal political decision is just completely contradictory. The minute the project turned into a community project,.it turned into a political project both by definition and necessity.

Now to some, dare I say most, this is a perfectly reasonable position for Andreas to be in.

If wanting different pronouns/gender neutral language is political, then wanting to stick to "he" etc inherently is political, too. It's completely incomprehensible to say that "position X" is political, but "position anti-X" is somehow not.

But, it sounds to me like it's more adapted for smaller devices and IoT, like the Steam Deck or similar handheld devices.

There are plenty of desktop focused immutable Linux distros. With Fedora Sikverblue/Kinoite probably being the most prominent one, but there are also Vanilla OS, the ublue distros and the one I'm personally using, (openSUSE) Aeon. NixOS technically counts too I think, but that one has it's whole own philosophy/structure that extends way beyond just being immutable

What were the pros and cons according to you?

Pros: increased stability/less risk of breakage, sepaeation of base system/apps that will be more intuitive to many non-Linux users, (Flatpak) apps tend to always be the newest version
Cons: still some smaller pain points around app integration, some flatpaks might have some features that don't fully work or you might need to change a permission (this has gotten a lot better already though), less suited for tinkerers

SUSE isn't owned by Novell anymore though. So this isn't particularly relevant.

There's this blogpost but it doesn't really shed any more light on the thing either

https://blog.sonny.re/retrospective-as-gnome-director

I'd say it's non-mouse focused. Heavy touch or keyboard focus work pretty well, but the mouse really isn't intended as anything more than a helper.

That could be a branding strategy, I guess, but the community project behind it will still need a name of some kind obviously. Unless they only want to show up at conferences/have a website url etc as "the project whose name shall not be mentioned".

And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming?

No, I don't think that. I *know* that because I'm active in the community.

OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise.

That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers. That's an entirely different demographic from people who care about Desktop Linux or setting up a home server.

Edit:

its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical.

I'm pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.

Editedit: According to wikipedia SUSE's revenue is about twice as high as Canonical's

No, there are good reasons for it. A lot of people get confused between SUSE and openSUSE offerings. Often SUSE customers show up in openSUSE places, because they believe that it's a place they can get official support. And I'm sure a lot of potential customers might get confused in the same way too.
On the flip side there are also a lot of openSUSE (adjacent) users who think SUSE is (secretly or not) making openSUSE development decisions or think they can dand SUSE to do that and that.

So there are some good reasons to consider a rebranding, but also some speaking against it, like the less of recognition it might entail.