> Debian is pretty old, but it's a 2nd gen distro, borne from dissatisfaction with the very early SLS.

Scratches their own itch, check.

> So was Slackware, but it took SLS and improved it. Slackware is arguably the oldest surviving distro.

Itch scratching, check.

>SuSE has roots as a German version of Slackware. Red Hat's package manager was bolted on later.

Pretty sure this was itch scratching as well.

> Gentoo and Arch are relatively modern, being 21st century projects. Arguably, they're 3rd gen.

Both are itch scratching projects!

> Fedora is a 4th gen distro, younger than any of the others here. Its ancestor was Red Hat Linux, which was contemporaneous with Debian -- but was left behind by Debian's technical encancements: in 1996 or so, Debian introduced `apt`, a package manager with automatic recursive dependency resolution. This put it far in the lead of Red Hat, which still only had RPM and no dependency resolution.

Arch and Gentoo are from 2002, and Fedora from 2003.

Fedora was based on someone starting to package FOSS software for RHEL, more itch scratching!