>Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into Linux in general.

By "nice" do you mean a distro which is fundamentally broken and far less supported then its parent distro?

>It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.

It is displaying the worst that is out there, just with a nice interface. These niche distros are always the worst choices, because they lack in support and are all fundamentally broken.

Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.

The truth is that Linux is mostly stable (even Arch), well supported and maintained. But this does not apply to these small hobby projects, which are just worse versions of their base distros with some ricing on top.

>FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.

At the same time I am free to warn people against this. These distros are a bad Idea and especially if you are new to Linux they will make you suffer far more than you should.