GlyphI'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.
This is a big problem because labor is not fungible and the reason that a lot of these people got involved in distro development *in the first place* is that those sorts of problems and systems are interesting and engaging for them to work on. They all want to have control over a packaging tool, or a build farm, or whatever. The redundancy is a huge problem and a huge waste but it's also the engine that powers the whole thing, to some extent.
Ivan Sagalaev 
@glyph mmm, not just because of "interesting and engaging problems", but many people came into it specifically because of their egos: *my* distro will be better (and I will be famous). Basically, you're advocating for abandoning the core motivation (or one of the main ones anyway) for tinkering around the free code.
@glyph my thinking was always that it's fine to have a gazillion distributions, but I'd prefer one of them to clearly win. And for that they need to care about the whole stack: from hardware to apps (like Apple). Canonical was in this position, but Mark Shuttleworth very clearly said they were not interested in hardware. @elementary does seem to care about the whole stack, but they lack resources. System76 does hardware + desktop, but not the apps…
@isagalaev @elementary I mean *ideally* we'd have a healthy fringe of biodiversity around the edges where users could move to a new platform provider with relatively low friction to pick a new "winner" if the biggest one started to enshittify the ecosystem, so a bunch of different free operating systems that are friendly to ISVs and low-effort to port to, but that does not seem to be what's happening
elementary@glyph this is one of the problems solved by flatpak. We now have both multiple flatpak platforms and multiple flatpak-based app stores that developers can target while the apps themselves can be used on any Linux desktop. Portals provide a predictable and cross desktop set of APIs and are defined collaboratively in freedesktop.org