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Why don't we allow questions about unofficial remixes/derivatives/flavors of Ubuntu that are still using the official repositories (e.g. they have nothing in sources.list besides archive.ubuntu.com/*, etc.)?

I'm not talking about something like Linux Mint, that's an entirely separate distro. I'm talking about something like the Ubuntu GNOME Remix (the original, before it became an official derivative). It seems to me that these systems are not different on a technical level, except which packages are installed by default.

If I can exactly create a setup provided by a remix, just by installing and removing packages after a regular Ubuntu install, that would be supported, but if I installed via the remix install media, it isn't. What's the difference?

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    Because we have to draw the line somewhere. The official derivatives list does that for us.
    – user98085
    May 30, 2013 at 4:12
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    @FEichinger Insert canned "half answer in a comment" message here
    – Seth
    May 30, 2013 at 4:14
  • @Seth It's a "because." answer and it's 6 am here! What did you expect? :P
    – user98085
    May 30, 2013 at 4:16
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    @FEichinger 6 am is when I get up :P
    – Seth
    May 30, 2013 at 14:05

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In truth, the answer to your last question is: There isn't much difference.

We do allow all sorts of bastardised installations on here, assuming that they come from a pure origin. But expanding that to change site policy would mean swapping our short whitelist into a saggy blacklist. We would also need to maintain the what-we-support list and it would take a lot of time to inspect how a distro is constructed (to make sure it is just a simple respin)... And we'd need to do that every release of every distro. That is not fun work and worst, it doesn't help people and that's work I try to avoid generating.

It is simply more simple to stick with the official releases, with the official support periods. It doesn't make everybody happy but everybody knows where they stand.

Unofficially, all sorts of people with all sorts of Linux distribution chance their luck here. Unless they mention their respin explicitly, it's unlikely a question would be booted off.

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