> This is why we have hundreds of Linux distros, which is fine for us who can sort our way through but average users throw their hands up in desperation.
This is probably a good thing for those who want something very particular.
For example, something like Ubuntu for the desktop, but without snaps everywhere - that'd be Linux Mint. Or maybe something like RHEL, but without necessarily having to (or being able to) pay - that'd be Rocky Linux or Alma Linux.
On the other hand, this also means that the community's efforts are spread thin, there's lots of fragmentation and the whole experience is just way more messy.
Instead of writing install instructions for The One True Linux Distro, you now need to write those for many, deal with multiple packaging formats and repositories, or just live with the reality that something available in one distro won't be available in another. I even had that issue with WireGuard, where it worked in Ubuntu but not Debian for a particular use case, shortly after it came out.
For as niche the types of BSD OSes are, they feel more coherent. I wonder what things would be like if we'd have similarly focused efforts for Linux, even stuff like one audio solution that's made to always work everywhere, one display server/compositor, one desktop that scales back to run as fast as XFCE or be as pretty as KDE.
But that's not how humans work and instead we'll just get new packages replacing older ones, sometimes for the better, but not always.
The very same thing applies to many FOSS software packages out there, but in a sense it's still better than some closed source package being abandoned and nobody ever being able to do anything about it.