> The point is, when it breaks and you need someone to help you fix it, it's often not enough to find someone else who "uses Linux" - you need to find someone e

> The point is, when it breaks and you need someone to help you fix it, it's often not enough to find someone else who "uses Linux" - you need to find someone else who runs the same distribution, because they all have their own init scripts, packaging systems, filesystem layouts etc. Again, greatly exaggerated. I'm usually able to use Ubuntu or Fedora forums to help solve my problems, even though I don't run a Debian-based distribution. If I'm having systemd problems, I can debug that the same way as with any system running systemd, whether it's Fedora, Red Hat, Arch, etc. If I'm having issues with my package manager, I can use resources from any distro that uses that same package manager. You're assuming that these variations cause combinatorially many possibilities for problems, but in reality, Linux is designed to be modular enough that these things don't compound in practice. That's not even taking into account that most Mint issues have the same solutions as they would on Debian/Ubuntu, etc., because most distros are derived from one of a small set of distros; very few start 'from scratch'. > By contrast, because there is a single FreeBSD, anyone who "uses FreeBSD" can probably help you with your FreeBSD problems. Yes, but NetBSD and OpenBSD? Not so helpful. And frankly, given the relative sizes of the Linux and BSD userbases, this isn't really a problem on Linux at all.