Most of these are kind of bad because they get organized around the aesthetics of a particular person or small clique. Just like how science only progresses on

Most of these are kind of bad because they get organized around the aesthetics of a particular person or small clique. Just like how science only progresses one funeral at a time, it is probably the same for software. That said, I do like some general principles of some communities. My biases are based on my own aesthetics and values. Arch Linux seems to have the philosophy of staying very close to upstream, and having all the tools be as simple and minimal as possible. This feels like the right approach for a distribution. To ensure everything makes it upstream, and have the packages all work together, and almost strive to make themselves irrelevant. Their build scripts are very minimalist and clear, and they have done good work on reproducible builds. So the ideology is determinism, minimalism, and no-magic. This jives with my view that software is buggy and error-prone, that it adds attack surface and points of failure. So the goal should be to minimize all of that. Guix, Nix, and Fedora SilverBlue seem to adopt this kind of strategy and take it even further. I liked Lennart Poettering's vision for the future of operating systems http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/stateless.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/stateless.html