>It seems like I should be able to install Ubuntu desktop distro with a KDE desktop package selected from the repo, then select all these creative apps and bing

>It seems like I should be able to install Ubuntu desktop distro with a KDE desktop package selected from the repo, then select all these creative apps and bingo - I’ve got Ubuntu Studio. You can do this quite easily. If you're already on Ubuntu it's as simple as enabling the universe repository and then doing this: apt-get install 'ubuntustudio-*' Which installs a bunch of metapackages, some themes and some performance tweaks. That's all there is to it, everything is in the same repos and there really isn't any fragmentation. From the Ubuntu side it's all based on the same Debian and the majority of Debian packages will run without issue. The presentation of all these different distros is just marketing.