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> IMO, it'd be better if these sparse efforts would get focused on _one_ solid, no-frets, no-hassle, Linux OS that ordinary people could trust to be stable and

> IMO, it'd be better if these sparse efforts would get focused on _one_ solid, no-frets, no-hassle, Linux OS that ordinary people could trust to be stable and reliable for years to come. I think that's conceptually a misunderstanding of how open source development works. If five people work on five different distributions, then that's generally because these people have different ideas of how they want things to behave and are motivated to work on realizing these ideas. If you would try to "focus" these "sparse efforts", you wouldn't end up with five people cooperating on one common distribution, you would end up with five people no longer contributing at all since the common system no longe represents their personal motivation for working on it in the first place. (That is if you would be able to magically stop the old distributions) Now if this is a good or a bad thing depends on your point of view. Is it harming "mass adoption"? Probably. Is "mass adoption" actually a reasonable goal for an open source ecosystem? Probably not. After all non contributing users don't really provide much value to the projects they are using, especially if they still need support. (I'm not trying to say that open source projects are or should be hostile towards users, just that increasing adoption is not necessarily a priority.)

btschaegg 5y ago
I agree with you, but would like to add another "nuance": Personally, I entertain the theory that a large number of people agreeing what an OS should be and do also isn't necessarily a good thing, even if it happened. That's how you end up with Windows: It's the greatest common denominator, and for a large group, that's really "low". For example: I'm very much a fan of how Nix and NixOS deal with the configuration and maintenance of a system. But I'm sure that the Nix way wouldn't have survived a more streamlined distribution landscape. In fact, Nix also works on BSD and OSX, but -- at least to my mind -- NixOS would never have happened there. And that's understandable. It's still ever-shifting and full of rough edges. It breaks with many established conventions and old "best practices". It's not for everyone. But it still represents one of the greatest paradigm shifts in system configuration I've witnessed so far. In a landscape where you get hammered into the conventional mold, such radical approaches could never blossom and prove their upsides. Again, look at Windows. There's still no established package manager for non-geeks. For home users, downloading and installing software from all over the internet is still the norm -- and where it isn't, it has been replaced through utilities attempting to lock you in (Microsoft Store). Conformity is a great way to enforce stagnation. Obviously, things are better in BSD-land, but I'd argue that that's due to the smaller user base, too. Plus there are also at least very specialized BSD distros, too (pfSense, for example).

btschaegg 5y ago

I agree with you, but would like to add another "nuance": Personally, I entertain the theory that a large number of people agreeing what an OS should be and do also isn't necessarily a good thing, even if it happened. That's how you end up with Windows: It's the greatest common denominator, and for a large group, that's really "low". For example: I'm very much a fan of how Nix and NixOS deal with the configuration and maintenance of a system. But I'm sure that the Nix way wouldn't have survived a more streamlined distribution landscape. In fact, Nix also works on BSD and OSX, but -- at least to my mind -- NixOS would never have happened there. And that's understandable. It's still ever-shifting and full of rough edges. It breaks with many established conventions and old "best practices". It's not for everyone. But it still represents one of the greatest paradigm shifts in system configuration I've witnessed so far. In a landscape where you get hammered into the conventional mold, such radical approaches could never blossom and prove their upsides. Again, look at Windows. There's still no established package manager for non-geeks. For home users, downloading and installing software from all over the internet is still the norm -- and where it isn't, it has been replaced through utilities attempting to lock you in (Microsoft Store). Conformity is a great way to enforce stagnation. Obviously, things are better in BSD-land, but I'd argue that that's due to the smaller user base, too. Plus there are also at least very specialized BSD distros, too (pfSense, for example).