Glyph@miss_rodent Multiple distros means multiple platforms. Multiple platforms means multiple dev targets. Multiple dev targets means that developing for "Linux" is, at minimum, *many dozens of times more expensive* than developing for macOS, or Windows, or the web.
Cassandrich@glyph @miss_rodent Multiple platforms are only multiple dev targets if you're in a 1980s-mindset of #ifdef hell everywhere. If instead you write portable code to the specs not to "works on my machine", and probe for things rather than enumerating a million build combinatorics, supporting a multitude of different systems is not any harder than supporting one.
LisPi@dalias @glyph @miss_rodent Dynamic probing also means we can eventually (in a perfect world) kill the build and just have portable code always and (almost) purely source-based distributions.
(You do technically need a binary bootstrap seed at some point. The oldschool option for this probably would be physical switches on a (large) machine for the user to set.)
I believe the popular term for dynamic probing and feature discovery is monkey patching.