The question was why people may find Linux inconsistent. The distributions are very much part of that, and even within a distribution, just a 2 year later LTS m

The question was why people may find Linux inconsistent. The distributions are very much part of that, and even within a distribution, just a 2 year later LTS might have wild differences because of the kernel promoting new mechanisms It may not be that much of a problem in practice, I deal with multiple distributions because for new servers, we pick 'm based on expected future support, and they're only a bootstrap to docker/podman which is the great 'equalizer'. So the inconsistencies are only a problem until our Ansible scripts have learned the difference and when we need to debug an issue. Not that often fortunately, once the configurations are in place things are generally stable.