[rkido]

That's just because no one actually uses HaikuOS or RedoxOS (no offense to these wonderful projects of course). If these came even remotely close to the popularity of Linux, you'd have remixes, spin-offs, and eventually full-blown distributions.

You can try to prevent it with project structure, but even something really unified like FreeBSD ended up having derivatives like GhostBSD as well as full-blown divergent forks like DragonFly BSD that are not necessarily compatible anymore with upstream.

[rvz]

Fuchsia is based on the same idea and has support to just one OS. The BSDs are not even a good example of 'something really unified' from the start anyway.

The actual reason for all of this is that the distro's themselves (and the BSDs) bundle 'hundreds' of external third-party system packages as first party just to get a 'basic desktop working'. I don't want to start pointing fingers at where a bug could be located at as it would be very painful to maintain and start searching through the whole Linux or BSD desktop stack. Good luck with that.

The only difference with the BSDs is that they just have a different kernel. Everything else has the exact same software stack just like many Linux distros.

Hence this, with having little to no OS fragmentation, it is also the reason why everyone only targets Mac and Windows. 'Official support' gets very expensive when 10 or 20 distros need to be tested on a CI or guides need to be updated as users tweak or mess around with their Linux distro.

[asveikau]

> The only difference with the BSDs is that they just have a different kernel. Everything else has the exact same software stack just like many Linux distros.

This is true once you install a bunch of desktop stuff from ports and packages, however, any of the *BSDs are much more cohesive than Linux in the base system.

And I guess even the degree of desktop integration varies. On OpenBSD X11 is part of the standard installation. On FreeBSD it comes from ports.