Posted October 26, 2020
HeresMyAccount: Actually that's a really good point, but it also seems to me like if a few distributions took basically all of the best parts of all the different ones, but with an easy way to customize them into something seeming more like whichever one you want, in terms of how it looks and works, and what you can do and how you do it, etc., then wouldn't that be the best thing?
Yup, but in practice the larger the project, the more there's going to be politics and bullshit involved. And "too many cooks", if that phenomenon makes any sense to you (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee). That means both a lack of vision and a lack of sense of direction, but also (at the same time) people with too much political power pushing things further in their direction while making excuses why others' ideas cannot be accommodated. The end result is a steady decline towards mediocrity, which seems to be the destiny of every large project that has a significant userbase of non-technical users. Likewise, arguments are always going to go "most users this, most users that, so we can't/shouldn't/won't blablabla for you." An alternative formulation is the passive-aggressive "we're happy to include this feature it you do the work", where it's rarely mentioned that they constantly break your work and just generally make it damn hard to do.
It's much easier to realize an alternative vision of how things should be when the project has a strong leader and a small enough following. Alternatively, a very community-driven approach (without strong leaders) works as long as the project is small enough that it doesn't turn into total chaos. But Linux distros aren't born in a vacuum and as you've seen, most of them use tools and applications common to each other. As long as these softwares' developers respect the diversity of the ecosystem, all is well.. but there have been some rather sad developments. I'm not going into it right now though.
Post edited October 26, 2020 by clarry