The FOSS world is primarily about freedom. You don’t have to align with someone else’s vision, you don’t need to be profitable, you don’t need to care about other projects

A.k.a. not getting paid, so you might as well do what you want.

Why do we need so many car models and manufacturers?

I don't mind the many multiple distributions but the default experience really sucks.

For example, there should only ever be one clipboard by default. If power users want multiple, they can go out of their way to configure their device config as such. Similarly, the function keys should function as function keys on a keyboard out of the box, without us having to fiddle with config files. Also the scroll wheel click to scroll should work out of the box without requiring editing config files. The default experience is still pretty poor.

So what exactly is the problem? To many options?

The options thinking they're an island retreat only for those who agree with their way while standing on the same continent.

What's missing is building something that resonates with the user/consumer's experience backwards, not just personal preferences or interpretations, which is fine, but at that point it's a personal project, not a product, or much larger unless it really captivates both people who can contribute to creating it and also it is adopted quite easily.

Creating beginners can seem like something too many OSS projects can be allergic to. It's the greatest sin of too many projects, and they ultimately can't be freed of it.

Either software is free or it isn't. You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom. Android is an example of an effort that took something free and made a usable mobile operating system ontop of it - but lead straight back to the problem that it isn't fully free.

Hm, there is also an option to avoid creating yet another fork the moment someone said something unpopular, or to try helping improve existing solutions instead of creating yet another cool project that achieves nothing.

Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.

Forks happen, I think, because someone doesn't agree with the direction or can't get accepted into the clique of people working on something.

So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.

I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.

That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.

Graceful forking is different than .. what too often happens with keyboard warrioring.

> You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom

But that's how a lot of projects do: Apache for instance, nginx, or llvm.

The problem is not being OSS, it is the lack of focus, and a game where everybody brings their ball and are playing the way they want instead of an unified game

To take LLVM as a convenient example ... why does it exist? Why didn't Apple pour its money into GCC?

Why does nginx exist? They could simply have found that config bug in Apache that made Apache slower and we wouldn't have needed another web server...?

Licensing reasons apart it's exactly because governance, even of these big projects like GCC suck

Every project should have some competition, in the same way there are several commercial DBs available

At the same time we have several linux distros that suck in different ways

I found a distro I love. I was a Fedora user but it just ended up being far too complicated with selinux. It is a miserable job to try to create RPM packages that work and also miserable to try to build anything out of git where the dependencies offered by fedora were too old - and then it wouldn't work without some kind of selinux config anyhow.

Ubuntu went down the weird GUI route but Linux Mint is OK - it's just nearly as complicated as Fedora.

Now I'm using Artix. The install was a bit old school but that's a one off effort. It's a rolling distribution so I almost never need to build dependencies to get something from git to work. There's never a "big upgrade". No selinux. The packaging system is extremely easy to use so I can often install the very latest e.g. chromium from git by building it myself and installing the package rather than a messy self-install in /usr/local.

In Artix all packages install with the dev component - no separation between dev and binary. For me this is vastly less hassle.

You can use Arch Linux (Artix is an arch derivative), with systemd if you want but I like Artix with dinit - it has all the ease of use of systemd but with an architecture that I prefer.

It's probable that none of this appeals to you, but I just wanted to point out that in an odd way I tumbled through lots of distros (including ones that I haven't mentioned) and found a little heavenly one that I love using every day because it suits my personality - perhaps you will too.