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.
Ben Berry@glyph (fully recognizing how helpful the following take isnt)
Yes, but also extremely no.
Being able to put forward a coherent, open-source, not-megacorp-owned product that is approachable for everyday use probably only happens if we do something like this.
On the other hand, there is strength and value in decentralization, and also value in specialist and niche distributions (even if some of their value is simply the delight they gave their developers)
I would also bet that a at least half of the stubborn split efforts are not around technical merits or the way they tie into developers egos.