Then you get to handle all the same criticisms that are usually lobbed at MS Office: no single user ever needs more than 15% of the functionality, but still receives the additional baggage of the other 85% -- whether in terms of memory footprint, reduced performance or UI clutter. The ability of FOSS to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths, and that has nothing to do with "choice" itself, no matter how much you try to disparage it.
Except that a lot of FOSS ends up pulling in huge dependencies to use tiny parts of them, doesn't tree-shake (granted not all languages make this easy), vendors a specific version of something you already have that would work fine, etc.
It also includes the freedom to choose any product from the shelf in any store. But let's have a thought experiment - does the society that allows completely free consumption of material goods, but punishes any criticism against the government, economical policy etc. has more freedom than society that have some prohibition on consumption, yet allows free speech and political action?
There is more than one facet of freedom, and personally I care more about collective freedom of the people and it would be served better by having few, but more polished FOSS options when it comes down to technology.
> What you're proposing is actually making the Linux kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a company like Microsoft.
I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.
> There is simply no other way to get "one distro"
You are probably right, this is why I am pessimist.
> I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.
Sure, and then maybe after that we can also solve world hunger and then all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
What you want is worthless, actually, if you don't have a plan on how to get there. We all want more polished software, less CO2 in the air, and more butter on movie theater popcorn.
If you want people to not fork, then you're either going to have to invent mind control or force people not to fork.
Well option 1 hasn't been invented yet. And option 2 is called closed source software.
I'm not sure I understand your position. You seem to be saying that allowing customization is bad for human freedom? Would you mind ELI5'ing that for me?
What is customization, if all you can customize are countless half-baked distros for tinkerers, teared through constant drama, ambitions of snowflake devs trying to make 100 competing solutions obsolete by introducing 101st, and forking, and, as a typical non-dev computer user, you are more and more dependent on adversary Big Techs?
If Cyberpunk dystopia ever comes, I am sure we still will be able to choose between GNOME and KDE, and there will be people saying that we are still good, for we have a choice.
