Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up!

It has been my pleasure 😊. I really appreciate your kind words 🤍.

It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.

Absolutely. But, I think it's nuanced and the lines are becoming increasingly blurry. If something based on Fedora can become something based on Arch (and vice-versa), if almost any distro has multiple releases/channels/braches, if software for/from any distro can be installed on every other distro, then... at what point is it truly "around these parts" rather than "with those not-hardcoded system specifications"? Kinda like how DEs can be (un)installed, and how those come with implications on how some stuff is done...

FWIW, uBlue has been brewing for almost three years now for their CLI stuff: see this issue tracker and this blogpost from Bluefin's creator.

The distrobox workflow overall has mostly been superseded by better alternatives^[There's sysext with its (WIP) manager, Brew Tap to tap into homebrew casks and some peeps even use coldbrew. And last, but definitely not least, nix support has improved over the years. And if you just want to use dnf, RakuOS' innovative hybrid design allows just that; an image-based core you can't touch (like the other 'immutables'), but dnf works and is applied through a persistent overlay.]. Though, for completeness' sake, openSUSE's atomic offering continues to heavily rely on Distrobox. But, in their defense, I think their atomic offerings are simply better^[Fedora's container images are tied to its major release versions. Hence, every 7-13 months you're required to set them up from scratch if you'd like to continue using them 😅. Even if this process can be streamlined, it's IMO very cumbersome regardless. In openSUSE's case, the containers are based on Tumbleweed. Which, has a rolling release cadence. Hence, it was meant to be used indefinitely.] suited for it.

Not the one you asked, but I think the answer lies in the bold part:

most of these will make new users unhappy or even question their sanity.

For example, I can't imagine any of the uBlue projects causing major difficulties. Though, edge cases do exist; adding kernel mods can still be a bitch, even if there are efforts to improve this.

I just thought that the phrase "the distro you are using doesn’t matter" is used to combat the analysis paralysis that many new users experience.

And -to be frank- while Ubuntu and NixOS don't even remotely resemble each other, I can't be the only one that feels that most traditional distros do feel kinda same~y.

Is there something locked down like Bazzite but with long term LTS release cycle?

The only high confidence projects I know of are:

• Bluefin LTS
• Endless OS, also see its documentation

There's also stuff like HeliumOS, stillOS and probably other images based (in)directly on RHEL Image Mode.

What do you think of this framing of linux distributions? Accurate? Horrible?

I skimmed through the table and its content seems to be up-to-date. Kudos to the maintainer(s)/contributor(s) for the effort!

The text above the table is more subject to scrutiny, simply for being ever so slightly more opinionated compared to the fact-based table. Though, FWIW, I'm quite pleased with the result.