Honestly, it might be time to put the pejorative term "Linux distribution" to death. It was pretty true when there was Slackware and Debian, but the we're not t

Honestly, it might be time to put the pejorative term "Linux distribution" to death. It was pretty true when there was Slackware and Debian, but the we're not talking about two stalks off of the same evolutionary branch anymore, but an entire ecosystem of different animals. Modern "distributions" ship with vastly different libcs (bionic, newer vs older glibc, muslc), different userland runtimes (busybox, "GNU/Linux" with core utils, etc), different compilers (various branches of gcc, llvm increasingly), different init systems (SysV, upstart, systemd, etc), different security frameworks (AppArmor, SELinux), different display servers (X, Wayland, unfortunately Mir and SurfaceFlinger) and vastly different UIs (from Android, to GNOME and its fragmentations, to KDE and its fragmentations, LXDE and XFCE, and so forth). You can't even bet on the file system hierarchy being the same anymore, with aberrations like NixOS running around. The saddest part is that Linux is the most some of these operating systems have in common, and these days it can easily have the least overall impact on most of the users. These things are completely different animals, loosely bound by design contracts like FreeDesktop.org's various specs and Linux Standard Base specs which everyone violates in new and unique ways. Not treating these operating systems as entirely different entities is being at best dishonest, and at worst is costing millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars in effort across the industry. You can't honestly target "Linux" as a platform because it's not a platform. If you've maintained, or especially if you've distributed any piece of software on "Linux" these days, you've seen the horrors.