I would like to start off with the "negative" aspect of questions being closed. Yes, I agree that the [closed] might look negative and can scare away people. The team acknowledged that – and they are currently reworking the entire closing process to address this. For example, the reasons for closure will be rewritten, and the actual wording of the close message will be different as well:
- Changes to “close as duplicate” (part deux)
- Help us make “Off-Topic” close reasons clearer to the OP
- Every “close” has its thorn: replace “close” with “on hold” for the first five days
- Help us make “Not Constructive” and “Not a Real Question” closures more effective
We close questions when they are not a good fit for the site. This isn't destructive though… quite the contrary, we do this in order to:
Maintain a certain scope. It would be destructive to the community if the scope became too broad. Maybe that's a bit of an extreme example, but you can't have questions about programming algorithms next to cooking recipes.
Maintain quality. Stack Exchange sites are question and answer sites and not forums. Questions should be reasonably scoped and have a limited set of possible answers. When a question asks for subjective opinion (e.g., "what do you recommend?") or provokes discussion (e.g., "Do you think Microsoft will release Windows 9 before OS X 11?"), those questions are closed because they won't generate useful answers to questions about actual problem people are facing.
Being closed isn't the end of a question though. They can always be reopened by users with the appropriate privileges. When a question is edited into better shape, it is automatically put in a review queue where users can vote to reopen.
And if you don't have the privileges yet, you can always flag a question for moderator attention for us to have a second look. Finally, you can just come to Meta and discuss about the reasons for closure, and ask for ways to improve the question—if possible, that is.
Now, looking at the question you mentioned, the biggest problem is this:
Has anyone ever looked for something like this? Ever found something good?
How is "good" defined? Everybody will have their own opinion about a certain distribution. At some point, with a larger number of answers, those questions will essentially become a polling contest. Not that we haven't been there already: In the early days of Super User, polling questions were still allowed, and quite popular.
At some point we realized though that these questions generated traffic for the wrong reasons—because everybody has an opinion. Everybody likes to discuss over trivial things. But this is not what the system is meant for. The format breaks when there are more than, say ten answers to a question. And the fact that a question has more than ten valid answers makes it seem like any answer could be valid.
In that case the answers were just links to Linux distributions. Nothing that can't be researched, and any answer would have been equally valid. Not the kind of question we encourage by today's standards, really.
