https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJAq1N_cv-c

(sorry)

Fragmented? The entire thing about Linux is that it is Linux. No matter how you decorate it, or put sprinkles on it, at the core, it is still Linux. There is only fragmentation at a packaging level, and it's only between three major schools of package. (RPM, DEB, and what else) This is becoming a thing of the past with package independent means of applications such as Flatpak, Snaps, and what have you.

All these terms aren't fragmentation, just because someone is running Gnome 3 on Mandriva doesn't mean they're getting something radically different from me running Fedora 26 on Plasma 5. It's just different environments, tailored to the needs of the user/consumer.

I can have my window controls on the left if I want. Doesn't mean you have to have them in that same way or order. You could probably put them so it's like Windows 3.11, for all I care. And you could make it look like Windows 3.11. Nothing is stopping you.

Wow. Seems like I bought a Windows gaming laptop just in time. Luckily, I pretty much already stopped using my MacBook Pro for games. At least I was able to do so on my own terms and in my own time, instead of being forced to when I wasn't ready.

FWIW, I used this article to determine what to get. I ended up with a Lenovo Legion Y520.

https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-budget-gaming-laptop-so-far/

Well, there *are* Linux distributions that, while sharing the same kernel, have fundamental differences in the userland.

Android is a good example of this.

Another interesting example is Alpine, which uses musl instead of glibc; therefore, binaries that link against glibc will not work (and almost every Linux binary you find in the wild links to glibc).

It's also possible to make a tiny form of Linux that contains only a statically linked busybox; such a system is rather limited, but not useless (you can decompress and edit files, provided that option was enabled when busybox was compiled), and it can be a good learning exercise to build such a system by hand.

Those are exceptions. But the primary desktop Linux can indeed work with may of the same libraries and files.

I expected to see Linux when entering this thread.
I was not disappointed.