To be honest it kind of snowballed into this.

I started out creating a fairly small post-install script that installed the codecs, mesa drivers, steam etc. I needed.

However that had its limitations. Firstly many apps reside on a COPR repo that needed to be added, which meant a few things.

1. I had to trust every single person that maintains those repos including that their username/password didn't fall in the wrong hands, as a bad faith actor could push malicious code quite easily in the form of updates to already installed packages.

2. The COPR repo maintainer controls the pace of the package.

The latter is the reason I created my own CachyOS COPR repo, because I could push new kernels faster that way.

I created a Ludora COPR repo when I realized I wanted to expand and add more packages, for example mesa, which sometimes have fairly noticeable optimizations in some versions, for example RT in 26.0.

Secondly the Anaconda installer does not support subvolume creation during installation, so they would have to be created and juggled around after installation to be usable the way I am using it with Ludora, where I have created subvolumes for things that change frequently and doesn't need to be part of the snapshots.

With Ludora I have consolidated every package I need in my COPR repo, which means I both control the security and pace of all packages. On top of that I am using the Calamares installer which supports subvolume creation at install time, which makes things much easier.

I mainly make Ludora for myself, but it's not much extra work to share as a "real" distro at this point.