Nir currently proposes to change the package name from "ld" to "dist". See https://github.com/nir0s/ld/issues/103
Comments on this name change proposal are welcome (over there).

On "Given the unremarkable simplicity of implementing this function correctly ...":

It seems to me that this is over-simplifying the task somewhat. Nir's "ld" package needs to understand all of the (currently) three different formats on Linux, and goes for a precedence-based approach to consolidate the information. Also, determining supposedly simple things like a reliable distro ID, or a precise distro version is not trivial, given that some Linux distros provide their data quite inconsistently between the different data sources and sometimes change things like distro ID incompatibly in a new minor release.

Overall, I can only encourage people to try out the "ld" package (v0.5.0 is currently on PyPI) and give feedback (on its GitHub project).

Does the deprecation and removal of these functions discriminate Linux compared to Windows and OS-X? Maybe, but I'm pragmatic here, and for me the important criteria is the one that was stated from the beginning in this discussion: The higher change rate in Linux fits quite well with the approach of having a separate package that is not part of the standard Python.

Does that mean that less batteries are now included in Python out of the box: Yes, a very small part of the batteries is now no longer included. But maybe one day when the "ld" package is perfect and does not require a high change rate anymore, it gets added to standard Python.

Also, there are many packages the average Python project needs these days that are no longer coming with standard Python (six, setuptools, pbr, better unit testers, lxml, M2Crypto, Sphinx, lxml, ........). If you look at the long backlog of pull requests and open issues in standard Python, it is a good thing actually, not to overload the community maintaining the standard Python even further. But that is a bit off-topic for this issue, I am just mentioning it in order to beg for acceptance for the approach taken for linux distro information.