They probably don’t know “why” themselves. Most Linux distros have no reason to exist. While diversity is important, Linux community likes taking this to the extreme, turning diversity and choice into fragmentation and confusion.

Siduction has been around for years and I thought it was quite well-known.

It is a distro built around Sid with specific adaptations for being an unstable, rolling-release Debian.

So, for example, because Sid is unstable by name and by nature, sometimes, updates will break things. Sid offers snapshots and rollback (based on openSUSE's Snapper) so if an update does prove defective, you can revert to an older system state.

I reviewed it here:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/05/siduction_2022_1/

Siduction is a successor to Sidux that I used for a while ~15 years ago. The point was basically "Debian Sid but more suitable as a daily driver" (e.g. you can still log into your desktop after every update). AFAIK, Sid doesn't break so often anymore though. So... yeah.

+1

Please for the love of the ecosystem, use the testing branches for the mainstream distributions. Stop making derivatives and more work!

Debian has Sid, Fedora has Rawhide, etc. Hell, Ubuntu if you really want a snapshot of Sid/Debian 'Unstable'.

If you still must deviate, explain! It can be implemented, improved, or automated.

I say all of this because... many derivatives exist when Packer, a script, or Ansible playbook for configuration would suffice. Very minor surface work, begetting insane infrastructure requirements because someone wanted another branded flavor. Creating more choice paralysis.

Because having snapshots is a good thing, which is for instance why Garuda exists, which is to Arch as siduction is to Debian Sid: an installer, a nice looking GUI, Btrfs with snapshots.