I'm mad about linux distros again today and I think I am realizing why this is so hard for me to write about systemically: I have a software engineer brain and so I try to model the various problems as technical problems. And there are numerous technical problems to think about (platform interfaces, ABI boundaries, release management, etc) but the core problem is a social one, which requires a social solution.
In short, all the volunteer-based distributions need to have a gigantic conference where they all come together and *agree to stop working on about 99% of them*, to pool efforts to make a real Linux platform. A lot of people will need to put their egos aside and decide to acquiesce to solutions they believe to be technically inferior, in order to be able to address the diffusion of labor into pointlessly recreating basically the same toolchain a thousand times.
@glyph Completely disagree. The fact that we don't have a "real Linux platform" is our strength. It's non-monoculture. It's why software has to be written to follow specifications rather than treating an implementation as the specification. It's why the BSDs etc. are still viable too - software that's portable to different Linuxes is usually also portable to them. It's why we're not stuck listening to the worst people forcing their ideas on us, but can make something different that still runs basically all the same software when you want it to.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/116189951658156876

@glyph And I know you're well-meaning, but this kind of wish to tear up the non-monoculture we've so painstakingly nourished over the decades, fighting to preserve consensus standards process and portability, is a big part of:

@dalias @glyph It's why we might survive ensloppification at all.

Because there are alternatives that have purposely refused for various reasons or which grew in their own weird corner doing their own thing yet implementing a same spec or interface.

@dalias Totally agree!

@glyph What you want is FOSS to stop being FOSS. To abort what makes it great.
And somehow you being on default Mastodon instance is kind of telling