I do believe that all these distro's hurt Linux. More than 300 multiplied with an amount of DE's multiplied with the choice between 32 and 64 bits is just too much.
And why? To give a choice? Do you have any idea what to chose with so many choices? I don't.
It's like buying a new pair of shoes. When the first pair fits and looks good I buy them even though my wife tells me to keep looking for some others because I might find a better pair. No, I don't, the first pair is good so I buy them to prevent having to chose with the risk of choosing the wrong one.
When there would be a couple of different distributions, 2-3 on the deb-side and 2-3 on the rpm-side of the force, wouldn't that be enough? Especially since also these distro's have different DE's to chose from.
Why are so many people / groups of people / companies constantly trying to invent the wheel?
News flash: it is here already.
Instead of working apart from each other and trying with yet another theme to attract users I think it is much better if programmers work together to make their distro's more Stable, more Safe, and give them more Speed. See my idea which I posted a long time ago:
http://community.linuxmint.com/idea/view/1123.
Are these three items not more important than another fork of a known distro combined with a flashy theme to make one distro?
Look at a distro: what is it? What makes a distro? The kernel, which obviously is the Linux kernel. Add a DE with its look and feel and system programs to make life more comfortable (file manager, terminal, calculator, etc), add major user programs like Libreoffice, The Gimp, a web browser, an e-mail client, give it a fancy theme and there you are: a distro.
Isn't that what all distro's have? Then why still compete with each other to get a few more users?
Now Debian comes with a distro release: Ubuntu forks it, Mint and so many others fork Ubuntu, Mint and the others are being forked again but the basis is still Debian who has done all the great work to release a stable OS.
Why not work with each other to produce an even better OS, an even more stable OS, an even more Safe OS? Join forces instead of fight against each other.
I strongly believe Linux will be stronger that way, more people (who are fed up with Microsoft) will chose Linux, proprietary software builders will release Linux variants of their popular software now only available on the Windows platform (for home and office), hardware suppliers will release better drivers for more hardware, Linux will be more popular and since so many programmers have worked on the basis of the distro, it is rock solid, it is safe to use, it is fast.
Isn't that what we all want?
Another thing is the release schedules. I'm glad to see that those have extended. Mint is only releasing LTS versions (maintained for 5 years) instead of having a new release every 6 months, which was ridiculous. Take time to finish your product. When it takes another month to do so then it takes another month, is that so bad? Why people want to have a new distro on a certain date? Just because the programmers have stated it will be ready on that date. Now they have to make sure it is ready. What happened? Even when it was not ready it was still released. Updates coming out the next days / weeks had to iron out the flaws. So bad. So wrong. Set a target product, set a target date and see if you can make it. If not, postpone the release date but only release a finished product.
Maybe a bit of topic, but I thought I had to write this as well.
