I didn't know about Vanilla OS. So it's a distro that wants to provide a stable and coherent set of packages, with as few modifications as possible from upstrea

I didn't know about Vanilla OS. So it's a distro that wants to provide a stable and coherent set of packages, with as few modifications as possible from upstream? And they opted for deb for the compatibility? I see the appeal of being Ubuntu-based. They do the bulk of the work of releasing stabilized snapshots of Debian Sid. But indeed you need to revert a lot of stuff if you do this, and increasingly so. > Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop As a KDE user on openSUSE that spend a lot of time on Ubuntu (before Gnome 3), I think this is the one thing that seems nice about Ubuntu customizations. This Unity-like version of Gnome seems appealing. Basing on Debian seems like a good idea. Debian is great. Releasing stable snapshots of Debian Sid while handling security seems painful. Good luck to them, I hope it works out well for them!