Since Red Hat made their recent decision, there has been a lot more talk about people wanting to focus on communiy-based distros instead of corporate-backed distros.
I was trying to think of how many active, stable, user friendly base community distros I know about. When I say a “base” distro, I mean a distro that’s basically the base for its ecosystem. For instance, Debian would be a base distro because it’s the base of its ecosystem. A community distro based on Ubuntu wouldn’t fit what I’m talking about here because Ubuntu is a corporate distro.
So, there’s Debian.
Arch is a base community distro but it’s not user friendly to install, but there are more user friendly varieties of Arch available like Manjaro and a few others.
All of the other base distros I can think of are either corporate, or aren’t particularly user friendly to install. Care to add your thoughts to the list?
Most community distros are small and based on something else; and that’s kinda the point. They’re not trying to be next big thing, it’s just a bunch of people with a common vision that come together to achieve what they need.
Debian and Arch are the exception, and, other than them, the only community distro that isn’t based on anything else that I can think of is Mageia.
I don’t mind adding forks to the list, or distros based on other distros, as long as the distro they’re based on is a community distro and not a corporate distro. Like you point out though, there aren’t a lot of those.