The same article was written billions of time in the past 20 years (at least). Few thoughts: - Popularity may imply things that are fundamentally incompatible

The same article was written billions of time in the past 20 years (at least). Few thoughts: - Popularity may imply things that are fundamentally incompatible with the way Linux works. Imagine Windows or Mac giving the possibility of fork, and of course, you will have seen plenty of "distributions" where people tried to fix all of these things that don't suit them, with a lot of hardware problems and software incompatibilities. The author says it himself: Windows 8 was the worst OS they used. So, if Windows 8 would have been forkable, of course plenty of parallel version trying to fix the problems would have appeared. Additionally, not sure forkability is compatible with some economic model such as "getting popular by doing a lot of adverts and costly initiative to win market share, paid by revenue we got by doing user-unfriendly-things (ads everywhere in the interface, capturing users, ...)" - There are more brands of car or of dish-washing liquid than obviously-not-anecdotical Linux distributions. I'm still not sure why people are so confused about the number of distributions. Just do what you do when you buy a car or a dish-washing liquid bottle. - Popularity does not really matter. As soon as there are incentives to not be ignored by hardware or software makers (and there is now for Linux, the amount of "compatible with Linux" is impressive when you think of the market share. Probably due to the fact that it is an important systems for some sectors and that Linux users are building bridges), then it does not matter at all to me if my neighbor is using Linux or not, it does not affect me in any way. I'm not sure I understand what is the point of being popular.