> in open source your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions. And your contributions grow in proportion to your income, and a lot of people g

> in open source your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions. And your contributions grow in proportion to your income, and a lot of people get their income from companies who have other than the best interests of Linux users at heart, and rather want to steer it in a direction that is most profitable for themselves. That's certainly fine for open source, but that's not fine for these distros as a whole, at least the ones that portray themselves as a service to the public. > It’s also inaccurate to say they’re not focused on users: you might not think you need a given feature but you’re not the only user out there. If your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions, users are not part of that equation. Users enter the equation if they're the users that are desirable for the people who are paying contributors. > Alternatives are there but most people aren’t using them because they don’t feel the need to switch as strongly as you might. And because people who insist that Linux move in a particular direction immediately start breaking things that used to work, and making their new thing a dependency. Then the alternatives have to spend all their time shimming that stuff, and the best they can hope for is to almost keep up. The prize for becoming an alternative is having to become an expert on the new thing that you disapproved of, or fall behind. You never get time to work on more parsimonious solutions to the problems the new thing claimed to solve.