Still not an open source specific example. 1) Due to the stability of the Linux kernel ABI, switching distros is far easier than between Interactive, SCO, SunO

Still not an open source specific example. 1) Due to the stability of the Linux kernel ABI, switching distros is far easier than between Interactive, SCO, SunOS, IIRC, Ultrix etc... There have only really been two major bootloaders in x86 Linux, Lilo and Grub, and the disk partitioning was driven by DOS/Windows and is still simpler than the dozens of differences between the commercial UNIXs or even adding on ons like VXVM. I have switched Linux distros at a data center level several times in my career due to various reasons and it has only ever been constrained by downtime budgets, and typically is faster and easier than a major window upgrade, even before modern tools existed. Different groups are always going to make different decisions, and those decisions will change over time within even single groups. Nvidia drivers are a complete mess, even without licence concerns. IMHO, with modern tools, you should let the application drive distro choices if needed, reserving your preferred distro for more generic needs that don't suffer from app vendor coupling.