I'd discourage the creation of so many distributions. The fragmentation problem is really bad. I'd encourage people to focus on one core upstream distribution

I'd discourage the creation of so many distributions. The fragmentation problem is really bad. I'd encourage people to focus on one core upstream distribution and then fork it downstream closer to the specific point of customization rather than creating over eight different upstreams. Alternatives are good but not when they're all basically the same. I'd only encourage root-level distro forks when people really want to do something fundamentally different. The kernel is mostly fine. I'd probably have merged OpenVZ years ago, which would have given us containers (and pretty secure ones to boot) much sooner.