> I've always viewed the "fragmentation" (opinionated differences giving the end-user more choice) between distros as a feature, not a bug. I see this opinion

> I've always viewed the "fragmentation" (opinionated differences giving the end-user more choice) between distros as a feature, not a bug. I see this opinion quite often and I think it's based far too much on "ancient wisdom" and not actually grounded in reality. Because in practice, the fragmentation has meant that people creating/selling cross-platform desktop apps take one look at linux and think: "Yeah, this isn't worth it". It means a poorer user experience for Linux novices (and even advanced users), because documentation doesn't always match what's on their desktop. They're missing binaries. Arguments are different. Things are implemented differently not even for the sake of being different, but simply because there was no opportunity to reuse the work, so none was reused (and now backwards-compatibility is in the way of changing that). It also means that there's a ridiculous amount of duplicated work between all the distributions. That duplicated work takes a toll on all distributions, which run on limited, usually-volunteer manpower. Those distributions with less manpower, the ones that will actually try new things rather than do something slightly-different, are the ones that are more likely to die. The fragmentation between things that are essentially-the-same creates a higher effort barrier to creating actual new things. systemd is slowly fixing all of this, and thank fuck.