From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It's very nice to not have a dozen different versions of the same distro to parse through and figure out that are simply the same distro with a different DE. Moreover, very few of them offer this many options.
Cachy could be doing a better job explaining what the user is looking at here and who each of these is for. Pretty easy to sum up in 1-2 sentences...
Maintenance burden.
Sorry, what burden?
Maintenance. Your distro has to support all the provided desktops, which includes a multitude of display managers ("login mask") doing their own opiniated session thing.
For example, Gnome is no longer supported by Artix, because they have now a hard requirement on Systemd.
It seems very unlikely to me that these are all "fully supported". Probably just 1 or 2 and then the rest are just like "yeah I mean you can try them", but I can't find any further info on their site.
But then they are not supported (shipped with them).
Being shipped with the distro is not the same as being fully supported.