this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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The author of this article seems to think that choice and alternatives are a bad thing.
I'd like to take the opposite position. The more the merrier. Come on in.
Variety drives open source.
Variety is good to a point. Too many alternatives and all you get is a bunch of under-resourced and unpolished results.
I disagree.
This assumes that progress on one distro doesn't lead to progress on others.
There is a difference between feature development and distro maintenance/packaging.
Feature development is done upstream and does flow down to others.
Distro maintenance and packaging is downstream, and almost never provides value to other distros. It usually doesn't even provide value to the next release. Distro maintenance is a hard, thankless Sisyphean task.
You think there is a dearth of software engineers out there who can't spend time on something cool like a linux distro?
Well, yeah. Its pretty well established that there is fairly limited resources in open source. Loads of software engineers, very few contributors.
Maybe because of projects that aren't interested in the opinions of distro maintainers, let alone individual contributors.
We can try to lower the barrier of entry. But nowadays open source maintainers have to actually limit controbutions due to a significant increase in supply chain attacks and generally untrustworthy code contributions.
I tend to agree. I like being able to install whatever distro I want and add the DE of my choice, and there is a glut of different combos to choose from.
However, are KDE and Gnome going to gradually focus on making their respective DEs work on their own branded OS, rather than any old base system? I know that's a worst case scenario, but putting a lot of added effort into a full OS is a nontrivial investment for a desktop environment. Some mission drift might be expected.