I've never used Fedora. As an aside, I find ArchLinux to be a much more stable bleeding-edge distro, and Ubuntu LTS to be a better stable distro. I just found

I've never used Fedora. As an aside, I find ArchLinux to be a much more stable bleeding-edge distro, and Ubuntu LTS to be a better stable distro. I just found some of the most obvious examples online of "linux is not about choice". But that's also the response to systemd becoming a hard dependency in most distros, because Gnome components have dependencies on systemd components. And it's the response when systemd made it harder to have /usr on a separate partition. https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/ https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-i... And it's the response when systemd pulled in the udev tree and then started requiring devtmpfs for udev. And it's the response when you put "debug" on your kernel command line and systemd sees it and spews so much debugging output into kmsg during bootup it overloads the kernel (eventually they backed down and fixed it). And it's the response when GTK+3 3.1x made client-side decorations unconditionally enabled, breaking some window managers (eventually they backed down and fixed it). etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. They just love making life difficult for everyone else and justifying it with "linux is not about choice". ... but that's all besides the point. My point is, I agree with you: if you don't like it you can always choose to fork it (unlike Windows or macOS or a proprietary Unix). That's what Mate did. That's because linux is about choice. The philosophical opposition to that is what is wrong.