Are you talking hardware or software manufacturers?
I don't quite understand the point of each (round)...
I confess, my daydream is too vague to satisfy your questions. I'm sure a real tournament would be fleshed out with more nuanced and meaningful requirements. However, for fun I will try to address a few points.
1. When I mentioned manufacturers, I had companies like Dell, HP, Acer, and ASUS (and their respective hardware & software partners) in mind.
2. Over the past five 5yrs I have personally had several distros fail out of the box...particularly on fairly old laptops.
3. In terms of performance, anecdotally, I've noticed differences between some of the various Desktop Environments. Also, Arch-based distros have been a bit snappier than some Ubuntu-based derivatives on my machines. I don't know what the discrepancies are...which is why I made it a factor in the tournament.
4. "Freedom to change" is very important. Thanks to the GNU GPL, I can't see how my fantasy would diminish Linux freedom. Lets say my fantasy came true and a distro like GeckoLinux won the tournament by being the most well-rounded and appealing of them all. The manufacturers would then add a new line up of Linux machines to their portfolios with GeckoLinux pre-installed. They would advertise the machines to the masses. And for the sake of arguement, let's say 1 million noobs (who have never heard of Linux) rush out to buy these GeckoLinux machines.
- How would the new users get "the wrong idea about GNU/Linux"?
- More importantly, in what ways would the existing Linux community be impacted?
* * * I don't know the answers. I just like the discussion. * * *