The whole point of open source was that if I think that you are doing things wrong, I can just fork the code and do things right (according to my idea). This is why Linux will never unify because the open source ideas behind it is a literal ecosystem that lives, breathes, reproduces, evolves and die. Everything is actively seeking to differentiate itself and starts new ideas to move things forward. It also steals ideas elsewhere and improves itself.
Oh and we do have a Windows/Mac equivalent of a Linux behemoth that pretty much unifies and glues most of the open source software out there. its called RedHat and (Linux) people hate them. They do roughly 10% of the entire kernel development and spits out most of the seriously deployed Linux servers out there.
I actually completely understand why RedHat exists. The companies that use RedHat are probably of the mindset of “We need this running and we don’t give a damn what it costs. If we call you at 3am you will be there”.
I can say for certain that the entire linux community getting behind a single distro will never happen. Just look at how much certain people despise systemd, firmware blobs, gnome, libc implementations, etc, etc.
You will never be able to make a distro that will appease everyone because there will always be something wrong with it for someone.
Okay so let’s say theoretically some company pulls an Apple, and just absolutely runs away with it and becomes a huge thing:
I think the main thing is that if there’s a ton of big-company work that goes into one version, that version is probably going to diverge in ways and theoretically elevate it over “stock” distros. Even if it somehow ends up being more closed off where that work can’t be duplicated into other versions, the inherent mutability in the core of Linux means it would probably end up being changed and customized by anyone who wants to, probably some big forks by people who don’t agree with something. People do still look for customization in Windows, even with much less tools to do so.
But to use MacOS as an example, it has a BSD core…but outside foundationals everything that makes MacOS is what they’ve build on top, because it’s all user experience. And hey, I use Pop! mostly for those same reasons, but part of that was also because I could, yknow, add extensions and add a few things to where I liked. A bigger company would probably just build a lot of that in by default, give the user some easy options…but it would still be Linux under the hood, so it would always be there and people would still do things with it.
We’ve seen that more restricted Linux distros get the highest market share. Chrome OS / Android / Steam OS and so…and I don’t think this is a coincidence. The more you lock things down and make exclusive, the more appealing it is for most people. Heck, even Fedora and others start to lock things down with immutable distros (Kinoite/Silverblue/etc) to jump on that train. And people like it.
Choices and options are very frightening to a lot of people. They just want to push the button and go. Guess why phones don’t have a lot of buttons anymore. Because keyboards are scary things…which is why we have touchscreen that have vastly inferior productivity. But usability and acceptance makes up for it.
And I certainly won’t vote on making Chrome OS or Android the true single way of doing Linux. As long as I get my packages from my repos, I’m totally fine with <1% market share on the desktop (which is the only segment where Linux is weak).
If I may break some things from time to time or some patch fucked up something or the proprietary driver lacks Linux support…so be it. The price of freedom.
Would any single particular distro “winning” be a good thing? No, not really. Remember that Linux is not a Uniform OS and there are in some ways more differences between, say, Fedora and Ubuntu than there are between Windows 11 and Windows 7.
Whether you use Gnome or KDE, Steam or Lutris, systemd or initrc, xorg or wayland, there are a ton of ways to do it. There are some things that are pretty much no brainers like pipewire, wayland (when supported) and udev, but most “core” packages? Those differ from distro to distro.
The problem can be summed up like so: A bunch of software projects has no policy; distros brings a policy, but no two people will ever agree 100% on the same policy for a complex enough set of topics or products. If nothing else, they will be fine on everything but the shade of blue used in the start button.
Errr, distros really are just an easy doorway and a method of quickly getting ‘linux’ into your computer, as well as a trusted pool of packages and secure line of updates. Like, even the things people use to distinguish between distros are typically smoke and mirrors. Package Managers? Useful tools, but aren’t actually specifically limited to any specific distro. With some clever stupidity you could absolutely install apt on an arch install and use it to download software and put it in your /bin/. Desktop Environment? Typically just some clever theming on a set of software you can install anywhere. This isn’t to diminish the good work of our friends in the distro packaging world, working hard to maintain updated libraries for all us selfish users. But the fact is that a linux distro is less of a monolithic thing that exists as a unit, and more like a gigantic pile of ants dressed in a trench coat with one of those fancy plastic eyeglass-nose-mustachio units.
The extra special secret being, however, that windows and macos are also large piles of insects dressed up as singular units. They are just, ynow, better at the whole disguise thing.
We already have this. In 300 different flavors. My dad loves Android, my neighbor has a Chromebook and my brother got his Steamdeck lately. I run Tumbleweed (and others). My bank has some Linux POS terminal available to customers. Everyone gets their niche with Linux. And all of them use Linux servers for their cloud.
Flexibility and adaptability is what makes Linux strong. It’s everywhere, but often more hidden than a Windows logo.
