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Valve is doing great work.

Now… maybe we could condense the 10,000 pointless distros down to a dozen? Oops, nope. Now 10,001, except this one has the menu bar in the middle of the screen and it moves around.

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The distros are not pointless. For every one of them there was a human being that wanted something to work differently and the nature of open source let them do it. That should be celebrated and the day we loose that flexibility would be a very sad day.

This. Not to mention that for the mainstream users there are mainstream distros that are largely the same they have always been: Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, so I never really understood the issue of having tons of distros out there for enthusiasts.

I think that both perspectives are right. We should celebrate diversity, but there's also power in consensus.

There needs to be some competition between ideas, but if every bit of disagreement about direction ends in "I'm going to build my own distro, with blackjack and hookers", then we as a community won't ever end up building something that can compete with the megacorps.

This.

It takes leaders. And people with vision. It seems the lack is there, and not at technical makers.

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