Collaboration Between Distro Builders

[benJephunneh]

It's been a while since I've had the time/desire/need to do a Windows installation, but it's come around, again. I got a new hard drive so I can put my old hardware into a server build and I'd rather not clone all the junk. A clean slate always feels nice.

Looking around the Windows "distros," I see an abundance of duplicated work -- quickly scanning through it, some of the work can hardly be distinguished from the work of others; handfuls of Windows distros with XYZ components removed and a bunch added, some of which are updateable while others are not.

I'm curious why people are creating so many distros that are insignificantly different than others'. It certainly has the appearance of creating a lot of choices, but there are actually quite few when compared with a simple distro that lets you select what you like and don't like with a choose-your-own-adventure WPI. Do I really have to create my own distro which is almost exactly like Fred's and Joe's distros, just because I don't want to be forced to install Google Chrome? That's a lot of wasted energy. Of course I can uninstall Chrome, but it probably won't be a clean uninstall, along with the handful of other software installs that I didn't choose.

My intention isn't simply to criticize, although I am ranting a bit because I'm frustrated. What I'd like to suggest, though, is something along the lines of what other OS teams had going. They had few releases, built their own WPI software, etc. It'd be nice if I could look through the Win10 distros and say, "That one is for gamers, that one is just themed (which, if that's all you done, I shouldn't have to reinstall Windows in order to get your theme), that one is barebones for older PCs," etc. The way it currently is makes me feel like I'm trying to shop for an Intel processor (not that I would do that, because AMD is better!).

All of them, though, should have easily identifiable and user-selected services tweaks, user-selected WPI software, preferably even user-selected Windows tweaks (for example, I wouldn't NOT install the Edge browser, but yes, please do remove Xbox, CandyCrush, etc.). To not offer some of this is to go backwards. Some of these have been the norm for a number of years.

And please, I'm not making any demands. I appreciate everybody's hard work and for keeping work like this alive, particularly because I don't have time to do this, myself.

 

[Des Rayz]

What I see here are different builds. All of them are unique in one way or the other. While I haven't ever had somebody complain about the various builds we have here.

 

[Power Bot]

I Think i understand what your saying is it would be more organized if there were more sections on the forums to help narrow down the choice. So for Slimmed down/smaller versions of say windows 10 should have their own section in the windows 10 section called windows 10 slim builds* or something... and normal releases in the normal section and customized windows 10 releases with themes etc can also have their own section ,, that way if a user wants a themed windows 10 they can easily navigate to the windows 10 / themed/ section and pick one... without having to look through all 5000000 releases in the same section .... Yes that idea is logical and it "could" work ... but i am not in any position to say yay or nay it is not up to me but what your saying if i understood you correctly could help organize and make things easier to find.

 

[benJephunneh]

I might say you're right, Des Rayz, at least on technicalities, but then I don't think two distros that differ only in that one has the print spooler service on Manual and the other on Auto would count as qualitatively unique. I'm not referring to a real example, but wading through the Win10 distros gives me the impression that, if they're all technically unique, a number of them probably differ in some similarly insignificant way.

Johnyy, that might work pretty well. I'm also just kind of curious why so many people are doing the same work. I imagine some folks just want to do it to get practice. It'd be nice if there was some collaboration, though, maybe even some friendly competition between teams for creating monthly or biannual releases...whatever people might want. There was another website -- that I guess I'm not allowed to mention considering my OP was edited to remove one of the more famous team names -- that gave some well known teams and individuals their own forum sections. Perhaps things could be set up such that good, consistent work gets you or your team your own section. It would even be possible to create a checklist for the forum where somebody checks "All Windows Apps removed except for Edge and OneDrive, Black Viper's services tweaks, WPI: none," hits OK, and then a list of matching builds populate the search results. This would rely on uploaders' accurately classifying their builds, of course, but they all seem to do that in the descriptions, anyway.

But I am, as you, not in a position to dictate such things. I'm just hoping for a less frustrating experience in trying to find a Win10 build.