[GunboatDiplomat]

I have to disagree with the idea that everything should be standardized. What's the point of different distros if everything is just going to be the same? Might as well just tell everyone, "Ok, we're all going to use CentOS."

[oblio]

If you want shipping, you want standards. They should be creative in the UI and system administration tools (maybe not even for those tooks), otherwise we can't build anything on top of them.

There's no real use for 3000 distributions anyway. Most of them can't even support the software they include properly. And most of them duplicate so much effort it's not even funny anymore (rpm vs deb, yum vs apt, etc.).

Standards are generally good (HTTP, IP, SSL, TCP, POSIX, USB, etc.).

[GunboatDiplomat]

There should be a standard withing the organization (we use CentOS for everything internally), and for systems which need to inter-operate, for example, the internet.

There does not need to be a standard for shells, for network script syntax, etc.

You say they duplicate effort, which is true, but you assume the effort being expended would simply be redirected where you think it's needed. If you kill off half of distros, you probably just cause the people working on them to go away, not switch to one of the remaining distros.

[oblio]

I've been using Linux for a long time and I've been involved in discussions about this for as long. A while ago I wouldn't have had a good argument, but now I do:

> If you kill off half of distros, you probably just cause the people working on them to go away, not switch to one of the remaining distros.

That would actually be good. Except for their personal benefit: they're having fun, together with their friends or random people on the internet, they're learning, etc., for the rest of us, they don't help that much, they just serve to increase the confusion. They also help drive away commercial software developers since Linux users in general are very active and vocal. And then we get stuff like "why isn't software X ported to distribution Y".

Not much real value would be lost if half of today's distributions would be lost. Specialized ones, like system recovery, penetration testing, firewall ones, file system layout experiments (Gobo) would still be useful. But the myriad distributions in existence are an exercise in anarchy. They're not even an exercise in democracy since democracy involves also caring about your fellow men and exercising self control and discipline, which many of those distributions don't. As I said, the vast majority of distributions can't even support their software, see the recent security fiasco with Linux Mint. Which is a very popular distro!