[sillygoose]

>> I don't think more resources or less fragmentation would change anything regarding the situation above

Well, as far as I can tell, lots of Linux people are hipstery special little snowflakes and fork things because some small thing isn't exactly as they want it, and that's where most of the fragmentation comes from.

Assuming that's largely accurate, why would it not be a problem?

What if we had, say, three major Linux distros instead of dozens of half-assed ones? How many tinkerer-distros does the world need? -As many as it takes to prevent Linux from ever conquering the desktop, it seems.

But seriously.. Please stop.

[kasabali]

I totally agree with you with respect to distribution fragmentation. Fragmentation there is much worse and definitely harmful at this point.

My above statement was specifically about the desktop environments, and DEs actually fit into your scenario. There are only 2 major DEs which have most mindshare, followed by handful of smaller ones. So there is not a bad fragmentation in that area (at least historically, there is now more diversity compared to 5 years ago), and the major ones have been with us for many years, AFAIK since late 90's? That's not only plenty of time to turn both of them into kick ass desktops, but also create wonderful ecosystems around them with high quality applications. Yet all we see is rewriting or porting everything every few years.

[keithpeter]

Not clear it is the number of distributions that is the problem as they tend to package the same libraries, desktop environments and applications. I agree with grandparent post that it is the churn in underlying libraries and the downstream re-work for no increase in functionality that causes that is the problem.

PS: Linux is widely used everywhere except traditional 'desktops'. Existing mainstream DEs are pretty good (KDE5/Gnome 3.16/MATE 1.8) and provide a range of choice.