I agree with your assumption that there’s the same number of people who want a real OS as there ever was. However, I believe there are more active distros and

I agree with your assumption that there’s the same number of people who want a real OS as there ever was. However, I believe there are more active distros and related highly-technical projects today than ever. So everyone has to share fewer contributors, except of course whatever the few hot/popular projects are (the latter is nothing new). I do worry though. Major academic institutions are having to put freshmen in remedial computer classes to teach them what files, folders, and devices are. The average persons is getting farther and farther away from an actual PC and deeper into the “app” world. Everything is moving to “the cloud”. Even software development is being pushed to virtual desktops/thin clients (look at GitHub workspaces [or whatever it’s called] as an example). The extremely large majority of software development today is web/cloud based. There are more and more of the non-technical buying “computers” that are really just glorified tablets. At some point, likely not/hopefully not in our lifetimes, it could become unprofitable for manufacturers to build PCs or only a few remain and the costs become prohibitively expensive to anyone but for-profit companies/corps. Hopefully that’s a pessimistic outlook.