so many companies would rather engage in collective punishment rather than just behave – see a similar thing with gamble-boxes in video games, companies are happier blocking countries rather than just publishing the odds/payouts/return-to-player …
if you decide on Gnome, keep in mind there are two main paths to follow – stock Gnome (“as the developers intended”) and Gnome with extensions (ie. addons or plugins or mods) – extensions can do everything from minor aesthetic tweaks (Blur My Shell, Rounded Corners, Remove Rounded Corners) right on up to completely changing the behavior of the window manager (PaperWM, Pop Shell) – which side of that particular divide you end up on is purely personal preference
heading in a completely different direction that what you were aiming for, but the declarative distros (currently a subset of immutable distros) like NixOS and Guix are trying to solve just this sort of issue – their main focus is on dealing with development environments but a lot of people have been enjoying them on desktop environments as well
ex. with NixOS, your entire system configuration is stored in one master config file /etc/nixos/configuration.nix (that you can optionally keep synced with git) – the main config can be modularized (ie. break out the hardware definitions into its own include so you can still use the master config on both desktop and laptop) – and Nix has been making big strides with Home Manager, their own way of being able to collect and define all of your home directory config files and theming
currently, NixOS is not for the faint-of-heart, documentation (both quality and lack of) regularly gets critiqued – NixOS and Nix package manager are all configured in the Nix language, a functional language used nowhere else
Guix comes out of the GNU project so dealing with proprietary drivers is harder than it needs to be – Guix is configured in Guile Scheme
think it more comes down to all the layers they’re having to deal with: (soon: Cosmic DE) on top of Gnome changes on top of Pop!_OS changes on top of Ubuntu changes on top of Debian changes on top of System76 hardware …
also for non-KDE, non-Gnome systems, there’s appimaged – requires a little more setup, but handles the set executable, automates the AppImage integration (.desktop files and menus), keeps a watch on specific folders for new AppImages, and provides a way to check for updates
got a similar situation in MUDs, someone finds a way to frob everyone else up to wizard level and the whole round of the game just becomes a mess of shouts
running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else
this is the primary issue – everyone looks at corporations when talking technical debt, but so many medium and small businesses are limping along on so called “enterprise” solutions they were sold a couple decades back and are now completely locked into proprietary formats for which support ended last decade
when this was originally posted, it got a lot of flack because Linux users were unhappy Chris Titus dares to use both Linux AND Windows
as @bbbhitz pointed out, “Pointless” was probably a poor choice of words, but Chris’ definition for that tier was basically “distros that install a couple stock packages and give it a new name”
as for the Devil tier
RedHat for closing their source
CentOS Stream because it’s not CentOS
Fedora guilt by association (they are actually a separate entity from their founder RedHat)