What would be even better - just a single, unified distro. Imagine if all those man-hours where actually focused on delivering a single working and polished FOSS OS.
Then you get to handle all the same criticisms that are usually lobbed at MS Office: no single user ever needs more than 15% of the functionality, but still receives the additional baggage of the other 85% -- whether in terms of memory footprint, reduced performance or UI clutter. The ability of FOSS to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths, and that has nothing to do with "choice" itself, no matter how much you try to disparage it.
Except that a lot of FOSS ends up pulling in huge dependencies to use tiny parts of them, doesn't tree-shake (granted not all languages make this easy), vendors a specific version of something you already have that would work fine, etc.
It also includes the freedom to choose any product from the shelf in any store. But let's have a thought experiment - does the society that allows completely free consumption of material goods, but punishes any criticism against the government, economical policy etc. has more freedom than society that have some prohibition on consumption, yet allows free speech and political action?
There is more than one facet of freedom, and personally I care more about collective freedom of the people and it would be served better by having few, but more polished FOSS options when it comes down to technology.
> What you're proposing is actually making the Linux kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a company like Microsoft.
I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.
> There is simply no other way to get "one distro"
You are probably right, this is why I am pessimist.
> I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.
Sure, and then maybe after that we can also solve world hunger and then all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
What you want is worthless, actually, if you don't have a plan on how to get there. We all want more polished software, less CO2 in the air, and more butter on movie theater popcorn.
If you want people to not fork, then you're either going to have to invent mind control or force people not to fork.
Well option 1 hasn't been invented yet. And option 2 is called closed source software.
I'm not sure I understand your position. You seem to be saying that allowing customization is bad for human freedom? Would you mind ELI5'ing that for me?
What is customization, if all you can customize are countless half-baked distros for tinkerers, teared through constant drama, ambitions of snowflake devs trying to make 100 competing solutions obsolete by introducing 101st, and forking, and, as a typical non-dev computer user, you are more and more dependent on adversary Big Techs?
If Cyberpunk dystopia ever comes, I am sure we still will be able to choose between GNOME and KDE, and there will be people saying that we are still good, for we have a choice.
Some corporate entity will just take it over and Linux will just be another piece of software constantly trying to figure out ways to rob you.
Fragmentation, though ugly and inconvenient, works as a defense. systemd, along with all of the other goofy all-encompassing subsystems that were inflicted on Linux over one hot decade from Red Hat, was obviously a ploy to do the above. The jury is still out as to whether it will be successful.
But I believe there is a degree of fragmentation.
If the fragmentation would look like this that we have, for example, just Debian, Arch and Fedora, we would still have a choice and escape hatches, and I wouldn't complain, even if it would be less effective than single distro.
That's part of what systemd is supposed to do: make distros irrelevant by providing a uniform software base, after which redundant distros would wither and die, yielding a few main ones which are cross-compatible with one another in terms of how they are configured.
You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.
Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.
> You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.
I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.
It already insures user freedom, and has for decades. The lecturing is a bad tone. You wouldn't even know this was possible if GNU, Debian, and Linux in general hadn't done it. They shaped your understanding of software.
I have no issue with GNU, Linux or Debian. The opposite, I am postulating that we would all be better if every one worked on those instead of creating yet another distro or grep clone, even if they provide their creators with satisfaction.
As for ensuring - how it is, that in 2025 AD we have more FOSS projects than ever, yet your typical computer user has less freedom and privacy than, let's say, in 2000 AD?
Bad take. If you can only ever improve what's there, there is no opportunity to try something new. For grep specifically, you can't much about its defaults, which makes "innovating" on its user experience very difficult.
>it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.
Why should my freedom to build my own distro that I choose to distribute for my reasons be squashed so some hypothetical "user" who might come along and have spoon-fed documentation?
Furthermore, the skillsets of writing good documentation and technical problem solving needed to build and roll out a distro are not 1-to-1.
The "political goals" are pretty fringe, to most people that enjoy FOSS, the goal is to get something that works for themselves and if other people don't like it, that's fine. Most people aren't RMS style revolutionaries trying to convert the global population to FOSS users. I admire that man, but his goals aren't my goals.
For that matter, if political victory were to be achieved in the way you've suggested, it would be utterly Pyrrhic. The only way to achieve a unified singular FOSS operating system that nobody forks or otherwise competes with would be to strip users of their freedoms to do so. So that's not a victory at all for the political side of FOSS.
You might conclude then that FOSS victory is impossible. I think so too, and that's fine. It doesn't stop FOSS from being useful to me and many other people. Some people will never use it, and that's fine.
But I didn't stated at any point I would like to prevent people from forking or starting something from scratch. I only stated that if FOSS contributors would focus their efforts more, we all would be in a better place.
That they won't, I agree, for, as this thread shows, libertarian and individualist ideas are stronger in this demographics. I also agree that FOSS is useful even in its current state, but being useful is not a goal of free software. Freedom is a political notion.
And common people do not need to care that much about free software ideas to consider political goals of the movement to be fulfilled, the same way today's workers do not need to care about socialist theory to enjoy workers rights.
Yep, and who cares about the FOSS OS part? We could combine Macos and Windows too! Think of all the money and time that could be saved by having a single global unified OS team!
I know, people have difference preferences, yada yada.