In a recent interview with Linux For Everyone, Alan Pope, a developer at Canonical which is the company behind Ubuntu, when asked about Linux adoption and what we would have to do to get there stated (paraphrased) "Stop making everything else, only focus on Ubuntu." Now I took a little bit of a gripe to that and was not happy with that idea. Not that I disagreed, nor do I agree, I am the ladder, SORT OF. Now, this is in direct reply to Alan Pope about this idea, and I hope he sees this. Now before I can explain my opinion, I should explain me. I am a distribution developer of Linux and trying to get a BSD system off the ground at some point too. I primarily use Ubuntu and Arch Linux (depending on many factors). I am a person of thought, and I often disagree with ideas similar to this. One of my most controversial opinions is Distribution DOES matter to an extent. I am happy there are 300+ distributions because all 300+ are different solutions to often wildly different problems, I can write about this another time. Now notice it is one of my most controversial arguments. Not my most controversial as that title belongs too why I have partial disagreements. I can, however, agree to some aspects, arguably with that same argument.

Arguably my most controversial FOSS opinion.

This opinion I am often hesitant about sharing as I usually do not see nice comments after, but let's try. FOSS isn't a community, it is an open competition. Now when I say that, it might seem true, but here is when it gets controversial. Linux distros should not be working together, they should compete... in the same way Apple and Microsoft do. What do I mean? They should try to fight off each other, and try to promote themselves as the best, explain why, and fight when they are not helping each other. This says "Work together, but remember there is a winner, possibly up to 5. You might not win." Now it is a little difficult to explain this idea further. Think of it like this. Everyone with the same product, for sake of example Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and Zorin. These six distributions can help support issues, help package for each other, and work together on many things. However, they all also have to put themselves to the world as the BEST. How can they do that? Well, Arch has the major flaw in not being OEM friendly. The other five can take charge of that. Manjaro specifically can call itself the OEM friendly Arch. The other five don't quite have something Arch does have, absolute user control. Gentoo is the only other distribution with that as a possible claim like that. Ubuntu is arguably the most user-friendly of the bunch, so it uses that as it's an advantage. Zorin, however, could come in, as an Ubuntu-based distribution say "I am the more feature-rich Ubuntu!" Where then the other distros can point to a mistake or two in the past regarding privacy. Fedora can say "We are open-source friendly, but you have the option to change that" while OpenSUSE can say "We are software friendly out of the box, while also being a fork of enterprise software, like Fedora."

However it is done, I don't care. That's not my job to say what they should focus on as I am an adversary at times. Sure my major Linux project right now is Ubuntu Lumina, which will be supported for the foreseeable future, and that is an Ubuntu companion, I also much disagree with the inner-workings of Ubuntu as an OS. Alan Pope is right and wrong. Right in the fact that focusing on Ubuntu is good but everything else is irrelevant. Just like how Windows needs Mac to survive and not be called a monopoly, the distros need each other to defeat Windows and Mac. Also, and I am not 100% educated on this but it seems to be the case, conflict causes people to pay attention, more conflict causes people to pick sides. People picking sides causes people to argue, people, arguing causes conflict. Rinse and repeat. Now some might say "this doesn't work, what do you mean?" and I mean that it does. Have you ever wondered why Logan Paul and Jake Paul are so popular? Or why Twilight is popular? Or... was? Ever wonder how DuckDuckGo is alive and if I remember correctly profitable? Ever wonder why Fortnite grew and Minecraft regrew at the same time? Conflict works as an advertisement. The same reason why ALL PRESS is considered good press in healthy doses. Now I do also understand the exact opposite is true as well.

Work together, grow together.

This works too, and I agree with this idea as well in the Linux community. Now two MASSIVE PRIME EXAMPLES of this working that I will focus on at first are two genres on YouTube. Animation and Gaming. Now why I chose these to start with as they are not competitions at all, unlike music which has a lot of competition and alliance. Gaming and animation on YouTube (for the most part) is purely working together. This is seen in Animation. They compliment each other, work with each other, help each other, and is (as far as I have seen) a pure "Work together, grow together" situation. Gaming mostly focuses on three channels. Markiplier, PewDiePie, JackSepticEye, as they are the big three in this genre (when they were in this genre). They all collaborated, supported each other, complimented each other, had fun TOGETHER. No wonder they are THREE of the most massive channels on the platform. For those who didn't know, JackSepticEye got his size in part from PewDiePie, a massive channel, shouting him out. Markiplier was growing at the same time and them working together boosted them into three MASSIVE channels. Now, this is easier to explain without an overly complicated example, so I won't do that.

Conclusion

Which should these distributions do doesn't matter. It is overall a situation, not of which situation is correct, but which happens. How they can do it doesn't matter either, maybe promoting each other, kind of like how Ubuntu Flavors do already sometimes. Heck Martin Wimpress, of Ubuntu MATE, basically is helping a little with Ubuntu Lumina with interest, with currently two forces offering help in terms of Website and promotion, and Joshua from Ubuntu Cinnamon helping so much he left me with nothing I can do as I am confused. He did so much but explained NOTHING. Still much thanks to him. In general, I use Ubuntu because it works better for my situation, but in the near future, I am gonna make my own LFS system for personal use. Leave your thoughts in the comments, shoot me an email at kai.lyons@kaix.live telling me how wrong I am. Don't forget to be awesome, be safe, and be stupid in a smart way!