Wasted Creativity in the GNU/Linux Distribution Diversity

Rough IMHO as of 2019-02-05

There are far too many distributions and desktop environments.

So much time and effort goes into developing, establishing, hosting, updating, maintaining, advertising Linux distributions and their desktop environments. Wasted energy, not only in their creation, but also people trying to find their sweetspot among all those flavours.

Efforts wasted into miniscule differences. A beautiful wallpaper does not make a beautiful Linux distribution!

A dozen GNU/Linux distributions are enough.Right off my head:

• Arch Linux (no need for Antergos or Manjaro :)
• Debian (no need for Ubuntu? ah well …)
• Gentoo
• Knoppix (?)
• RHEL (Redhat, Fedora, CentOS)
• Slackware
• SLES (openSUSE, Tumbleweed)
• Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE) – all debatable *)
• Void

Same goes for the GUI – Five Desktop Environments are enough. GNOME Shell, KDE, MATE, LXQt, XFCE

Admittedly, some of them do offer nice features and looks (e.g. Budgie, Cinnamon, Enlightenment, Lumina, RazorQt, Pantheon, Unity) – wouldn't the nicety be spread more widely made available as configurable options within the big five?

So please stop creating new sub-sub-sub-sub distributions. Instead, try to make a difference in established wide-spread software. If you're out of ideas, help XFCE upgrade GTK – for instance.

*) Xubuntu/Ubuntu MATE still make it right by re-using a common base.