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.
Phie Lux 
@glyph It’s not just about egos either. Different people have different incompatible ideologies. You have free (libre) software purists and open source purists and free (beer) purists and license hawks and IP anarchists and people who may not be able to say it out loud but are quite happy to serve the interests of capital and people who can’t even agree what serves the interests of capital. And many of these aren’t differences of opinion in means but differences of opinion in ends. You can’t get people to agree who don’t agree on goals. If you can get everybody to agree that the goal is to create the Linux, you have a shared goal and it is conceivably achievable. I can’t see that happening. Distributions, like all software, are always a means to an end.