Accurate, but not bad, yes. It turns out standardized base systems and ABIs are important to an ecosystem.
Linux tried the disorganized free-for-all for two decades, and what we got was fragmented “Ubuntu admins”, “debian admins”, “redhat admins”, “suse admins”, and a whole shitload of duplicated effort in the packaging ecosystem, only for half the packages out there to be locked to Ubuntu or RHEL. So the corporate interests, and a fair number of the community efforts, centralized their problems and solutions into a small standardized suite in Mesa+Wayland+systemd+Pipewire+flatpak, etc
The result is a ton more interoperability, a truly open ecosystem where switching your distro doesn’t mean hiring different people and using different software, and a lot more stability and maturity.
And hey, if a user or distro wants to do their own thing, they can make and own their niche, same as before. Nothing lost.
It’s been kind of wild to watch over the past 15 years or so, makes me very hopeful for the next 15.
Accurate, but not bad, yes. It turns out standardized base systems and ABIs are important to an ecosystem.
Linux tried the disorganized free-for-all for two decades, and what we got was fragmented “Ubuntu admins”, “debian admins”, “redhat admins”, “suse admins”, and a whole shitload of duplicated effort in the packaging ecosystem, only for half the packages out there to be locked to Ubuntu or RHEL. So the corporate interests, and a fair number of the community efforts, centralized their problems and solutions into a small standardized suite in Mesa+Wayland+systemd+Pipewire+flatpak, etc
The result is a ton more interoperability, a truly open ecosystem where switching your distro doesn’t mean hiring different people and using different software, and a lot more stability and maturity.
And hey, if a user or distro wants to do their own thing, they can make and own their niche, same as before. Nothing lost.
It’s been kind of wild to watch over the past 15 years or so, makes me very hopeful for the next 15.