In a ship of theseus kind of way i guess you can turn almost anything into anything else :p

Are you bored? Did you just build a strawman version of your own community to argue about something that is trivially easy to answer for everyone in this community? I am seriously confused. I have never ever heard anyone say that you could turn any distro into any other. That is just obviously not true. And every single question on your bullet point list is equally easy to answer.

When people say that it doesn’t matter which distro you use what they obviously mean is that the desktop environment has the way more immediate and tangible impact on the user experience. So as long as the newcomer choses one of the many distros that have an intuitive installer (so obviously not Arch), are reasonably up to date, have a broad software package repository, and come with one of the major environments pre installed, it really does not matter that much.

guys seriously … Science literacy is important. That especially goes for the incompetent editors at the guardian. This is NOT a study. This is a blog post describing that the particular UCL research group got a research grant accepted. In other words, they got grant money, so they can produce research on this topic IN THE FUTURE. Notice, that everything in that post is written in future tense except for the paragraph called “Research to date” and there is NO RESULTS.

Yes of course, this correlation is obvious. That is why there has been an abundance of research done on this topic already. But of course, as is the case with pretty much every field in science, this topic remains incredibly important and doing more research there will always remain important. Research is an ongoing process and most scientific publications are minute incremental improvements in understanding. So everyone who is saying “hurr durr this is obvious, so much money wasted on such nonsense”, please shut the fuck up and LEARN TO READ

Sorry for the profanity. Having worked in research, i am quite disillusioned by the common misunderstanding of the scientific process.

well not that shocked

Piker, a liberal political commentator

Yes the famously very liberal commentator …