Infinite variations is the bane of free/open software. It is the primary reason it hasn't taken over everything, IMHO.

And yet, it has, for definitions of "everything" that aren't a desktop computer, or an iDevice.

If I was in the market of workstation software such as CAD, Music DAWs, industrial automation etc. I would much rather have control over the base OS by shipping a customised version of Debian or similar. This would be very compelling for professional users also, who don't want the consumer-oriented cruft and bloat associated with Windows and Mac OS.

How would you deal with customers' corporate IT banning any non-certified OS from the network?

At work, we have a big TV screen showing an alert overview (a Grafana dashboard). A Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and Firefox would be enough to do that, but if we were to connect one to the LAN, its MAC would be blacklisted within less than a hour. (I've heard a report from a contractor plugging his own notebook into Ethernet, who had said cable ripped out by the local admin a few minutes later.) We ended up using an old notebook from one of our colleagues running Windows 7 Enterprise. Every few days, we have to RDP into it to click through app updates or restart the browser or something like that.

IPtables, block all incoming traffic aside from arps and replys to known traffic?

And what do you do when your customer wants to use on the same machine two professional apps from different vendors?

How do you reconcile Adobe Linux for After Effects/Photoshop/Premier with Autodesk Linux for Maya/...?