I think you're broadly correct, but your timing is off. I'd say it's not in the last decade, but more like this has been growing for the last 15+ years, and the

I think you're broadly correct, but your timing is off. I'd say it's not in the last decade, but more like this has been growing for the last 15+ years, and the trend started at the end of the 1990s. In the 1990s, RH was Linux to the extend that there was a site called `redhatisnotlinux.org`. The thing that made Linux viable as a desktop OS was KDE, the first FOSS desktop for Linux. There had been commercial ones, such as IXI X.desktop, and Xfce which only became FOSS later, but KDE was FOSS from the start. But not FOSS enough for RH, which took a Stallmanite position over Qt and excluded KDE from its distro. That led to Mandrake, which was basically Red Hat Linux with KDE, but it also fostered non-RH distros such as SUSE, Caldera and Corel LinuxOS. Rather than getting on board the movement, RH forced a split in the community and sponsored GNOME instead. Down with Qt, down with C++, down with dual licensing: we'd rather reimplement the entire thing from scratch than sully our hands with a toolkit that is sold -- ew -- and C++ -- doubleplus ew. Result, RH starts to get sidelined. GNOME does great, though, and GNOME 2 brings harmony to the FOSS Unix world. Even Solaris adopts it. So Microsoft attacked. Result, GNOME 3 and dozens of new and revived desktops. RH made one good move: it found a funding model, and a great one. It should never have bought CentOS in the first place. That was a huge, stupid mistake and it harmed both the company and RHEL. It finally did the right thing killing it off. Stream is probably good for those in the community contributing but it's of no appeal to anyone else.