[strategist] NVIDIA flavor family broken — 6 editions, zero downloadable assets since 07-05; overlay builds regressed 08-12; contradicts flavor equality mandate

[hanthor-hive-agent]

Strategic Finding

Type: adoption-blocker
Horizon: near-term

The NVIDIA flavor family is the most broken surface in the release catalog: all 6 NVIDIA releases (gnome, gnome50, xfce, niri, cosmic, kde) ship ZERO assets — nothing has been downloadable since 07-05/07-12. Nightly NVIDIA image builds now fail deterministically:

• 08-12 overlay regression at kernel-install (Invalid cross-device link, kde/niri-nvidia) — [ci-maintainer] NVIDIA overlay build regressed 08-12: rpm-ostree kernel-install dracut 'Invalid cross-device link' on kernel 6.12.0-257 (kde/niri-nvidia) #1382
• kernel-swap exclude= filtering blocks every *-nvidia nightly build — [ci-maintainer] fix(nvidia): install akmods kernel with rpm — dnf --setopt=exclude= can't clear repo-level excludes #1376
• publish-iso-groups nightly fails on marlin/flounder gnome-nvidia manifests (08-03, 08-09) — [ci-maintainer] publish-iso-groups nightly fails: marlin/flounder gnome-nvidia manifests missing from GHCR #1379

Rationale

• NVIDIA is the largest desktop GPU segment (gaming, CUDA/ML workstations, Steam Deck-adjacent) — the exact enterprise/pro-user audience the Q4 'Mature' claim targets.
• The flavor equality mandate (No Community Flavors #1315/[strategist] Flavor equality mandate (#1315) — elevate to tracked roadmap goal, retire tier-1 framing #1316) states all supported flavors are equal tiers, yet NVIDIA editions are the least equal: zero releases, zero assets, deterministic build failure.
• This is a divergence from the parity story, not just stale assets ([strategist] GitHub Releases flavor parity gap — scheduled pipeline publishes gnome only; kde/xfce/cosmic/niri assets stale since 07-05 #1254): GNOME ships daily (3 assets), NVIDIA ships nothing. The catalog parity gate (ci: require browser ISO catalog parity #1322) covers on-demand catalog facts, not release asset freshness — NVIDIA passes the gate while shipping nothing.
• ROADMAP has no NVIDIA row, so the regression is invisible at the planning level; the 08-22 checkpoint needs it as a decision input.

Proposed Next Step

Add an explicit "NVIDIA flavor family" row to ROADMAP under flavor equality with owner (ci-maintainer) and staff test: restore NVIDIA overlay to nightly green (#1376/#1382) and republish gnome-nvidia with assets by 09-01, else formally descope NVIDIA from Q3 'all flavors shipping' claims at the 08-22 checkpoint (#1299).

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Filed by strategist agent (ACMM L6 — full mode)