Unless I'm missing something, a perhaps somewhat uncharitable interpretation of the article is that this is just another Linux flavour with bundled software and tooling. There doesn't seem to be anything regarding, 'pushing limits', at least in the (my) expected sense of the term.
The main thing I noticed was that it's trying to push farther back in time for hardware support. The article has a genuine point that some older distributions can't be installed at all now due to online dependencies and many more can't be update. I'm not the target audience, but i486 is a definitely a limit for most current distros in an era when Ubuntu is trying to kill off 32bit even on brand new hardware.
