We should not change our policy - our scope - in the way you propose. By policy, I mean what dessert said
Let’s define “policy” here: For me that’s the set of rules which we as a community act on, it is partially codified on the mentioned help pages, but meta discussions and just-the-way-we-handle-things are equal parts of it as well. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s codified on a particular webpage or not.
Policy is what we do when we are not acting out. You are proposing that people should handle certain things in certain ways. If you don't want to call it policy, ok, but if the community does what you suggest and cites this post, that's a contradiction of our current scope policy, which, embodied on the help page and in many meta posts and in our actions, is that a question is on topic when the user is using Ubuntu. Note that it is not, and has never been, that the question must be specific to Ubuntu.
When I explain to users that their question is off-topic because we only support Ubuntu here, I usually link to this post by Eliah Kagan. I recommend reading it to everyone, because it says so much better than I can why we have this policy, but perhaps the most relevant part here (emphasis in original) is:
There's often no way to know at the outset if a question's answers will be Ubuntu-specific, Mint-specific, or otherwise. We send people somewhere they may get better help before failing to help them instead of after. In situations where we would have succeeded, other, more suitable resources would likely also succeed.
You have proposed a checklist which we must use to determine whether a question is distro-agnostic. I have already forgotten your list, and that matters, because policy should be straightforward, but I'll scroll up and paste it here so we can all read it again.
- Does the issue involve any of the utilities that are used on Ubuntu or are shipped with Ubuntu?
- Can the issue be solved with POSIX-compliant utilities and shell?
- Can the issue be solved without touching kernel specifics, filesystem tree, or foreign packaging system?
Assuming this is a complete list of all the things that could cause a question to be somehow specific to Ubuntu (which I personally doubt - for example, what about the use of sudo on Ubuntu, running as root by default on some distributions, etc), I personally would have enormous difficulties determining whether any or all of the above were true for the great majority of questions I deal with here (and this really matters, even if it's only me, because, to date, I have done 15,433 close vote reviews, and 2,208 reopen reviews, and cast probably as many again close and reopen votes outside of the queues). I think your and others' estimation of how many questions we get are distro-agnostic (at least, fully determinable as such with the given information) is exaggerated. I think this is a pretty distro-agnostic question, but few of our questions are theoretical like this one (and like many on U&L); most of them are of the form "I have this problem with my system, and I don't know how to fix it". Determining whether such questions are distro-agnostic requires knowledge that we in our roles as moderators (in the broad sense that "Ask Ubuntu is moderated by you - I mean what we are doing when we vote up, down, to close, to reopen, to delete, or comment, or edit, or review), cannot reasonably be expected to have.
Let me contest the distro-agnosticity of a couple the tags you mentioned just to underline this point.
command-line / bash - questions with these tags are often about configuration, manipulating files, root access. Answers may require a file to be in some particular place or for a shell to be configured a particular way. Here's one example where I had to enter a long discussion with a user because they weren't using Ubuntu (I did try to close the question, but there was not enough interest).
partitioning - may also be about system-installation.
permissions - Ubuntu has a unique configuration for root, with sudo enabled for the first user by default and intended to be used for all administrative tasks. This differs from most other distributions.
python - if a question about Python is truly distro-agnostic, it's likely to be at least borderline off-topic here and should be on Stack Overflow. I'd say the majority of questions about Python here are about package management and configuration which relate to the Ubuntu environment more or less. This is pretty much the rather subjective delineation of whether a programming question is on topic - can it be interpreted as an end-user issue? Or, does the issue seem to have something to do with the environment? If yes, it's on topic here, otherwise, it's probably a generic programming question and unless it's about shell scripting (the exceptional case) it's out of scope. (Just in case this comes off wrong, I am absolutely not suggesting that questions about Python should be off topic and I'd like to say that I appreciate that many answers using Python here have added value since they are applicable even on non-Linux systems.)
We have a simple policy that everyone can easily apply, and you want to make it extremely hard! I do not see any reason for doing that. There is no need for it. All questions about other distros are on topic on both Unix and Linux and Super User. Many are also on topic on other sites, such as RaspberryPi or elementaryOS. We have plenty of questions here. In fact, we have more questions than we can handle. Our answered rate is <70%. We need more answers.
To your invocations of codes of conduct, I can only say that it is definitely possible to be respectful when telling someone that their question belongs elsewhere. If not, we have bigger problems than our scope policy. In relation to collaboration and so on, here's what Eliah wrote about respecting other communities (this is Fear #4 on your list, the rest of which I will address in a separate answer)
Finally, I believe there is a reason pertaining to the well-being of the Mint community (and other such communities). Suppose we allowed Mint questions and some Mint users embraced Ask Ubuntu as an excellent place for them. Then the Ubuntu community would come to be seen as an authoritative source for information about Mint. Mint (and most other unofficial derivatives) are deliberately unofficial; most don't want to be subject to the will of the Ubuntu community or the governance structures in it.
So it would be bad if we were to absorb Mint. It would take power away from that community. Some people use Linux Mint because they want to be part of the community and governance structures set up for it and not for Ubuntu. We should respect people who choose to partake in other communities.
Efforts for greater cooperation are a good thing, and I think we do need more of them. But unless the overwhelming majority of Mint users want to be assimilated into our community (either partially, for support purposes, or all the way, by becoming an official derivative), I don't think it's a good idea to have Mint questions here.
This is the ethical case for staying in our lane, which is apparently often missed. When people argue that it's good for our site to allow questions that are not about Ubuntu as long as some conditions are met, they are ignoring these considerations.
Finally, you have not described in detail how you expect this proposal to be implemented or considered how the site would change if such a policy change were made. Here are a couple of considerations.
- Reviewers of close and reopen votes would have to determine whether posts are distro-agnostic, which is IMHO unreasonable. In chat, Eliah Kagan said
the idea that we should appoint close reviewers as experts on other operating systems for the purposes of adjudicating whether they are enough like Ubuntu for specific purposes is, I think, entirely unworkable.
As a prolific reviewer, I could not agree more, and I beg you not to push this on me. You propose the use of search engines, but as I have mentioned elsewhere the differences between Linux distros are not documented comprehensively or accessibly anywhere.
- Partly due to the above, mistakes would be made, and answers would be posted that are not applicable to Ubuntu (in fact, they already are, but usually only on much-viewed questions with many other answers), because of people trying hard to get accepts.
- Scope would be oriented around Ubuntu-specificity. At the moment, Ubuntu-specificity has very little to do with our scope. There are borderlines where it comes into play, such as the programming one I mentioned above, but, as has been mentioned in other posts, when something is the same as Ubuntu but on a different distro, we still close it, and when something is the same as on a different distro but on Ubuntu, we still leave it open. We only need to know if the OP is using Ubuntu. We have hardly ever cared whether the issue is specific to Ubuntu, until your proposal. I don't know how people's understanding of the site's scope would change over time with this reorientation, but I think it will be harder to understand and less consistently applied by all concerned: community and visitors.
Note: in your question, you say that "[users] vehemently oppose mentions of other distros". I have taken that wording to be disingenuous, and answered as if you meant that users oppose leaving open questions in which the OP states that they are using another distro, because I think that is what you meant (and I am one of those users), and because merely mentioning another distro has never been an acceptable reason to close, though it certainly does trigger incorrect close voting at times.
Note regarding Fear #2: Only high rep users can do this
If that were true, it would not be worrying. If you are proposing (which was not clear to me) that people should edit distro information out of posts on the basis of whether or not they think the question is distro-agnostic, an action I consider to be wrong, then obviously the fact that literally anyone can suggest an edit to any unlocked post is what makes it disturbing that such an action is being advocated. In chat, I said
[L]etting things slide where there's a preexisting answer to save, ok, maybe I can live with it. But people with diamonds like @Seth and @terdon publically saying things like "yeah you can edit out the distro information if you know it's a distro-agnostic issue"... this is virtually policy-making. A bunch of high rep users might just take it upon themselves to go around doing that. And telling other users what they are doing, inevitably, and everyone will copy them.
It's the "everyone will copy them" part, that really concerns me.
Personal note:
There are persistent fears within community, which often are on the verge of emotional investment rather than practical and professional view on the issue.
My investment in Ask Ubuntu is absolutely emotional and not professional. I care deeply about the site and nobody is paying me to contribute to it, though I do get a lot out of it in validation feels, friendly chats etc.