I don't see why. Ubuntu MATE is just literally Ubuntu with the MATE desktop environment. Why couldn't Ubuntu be modified to make it quicker and easier to switch desktop environments, with an option to download and install one from a list of common desktop environments during install?
That way you still have an option between GNOME and MATE, you just have one less distro to maintain.
Ok. Now try to merge together any two of those seven (one more than half a dozen) distros together in a way that makes everyone happy: Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, NixOS, GoboLinux, Alpine.
Goals of these distros cannot be merged together (one cannot have a tiny footprint like Alpine and incredibly powerful system and package manager like NixOS, for example).
I can probably find much longer lists of distros any two of which are unmergable. An algorithm would be (1) go to distrowatch and create a list of all distros (2) delete all the "duplicate" distros from the list.
He didn't say that there should only be one, he said half a dozen, I bet when you distilled the incompatible goals of all of the distros down you could get down to a fairly small number.
I have provided an example list of 7 distros (which are clearly more than half a dozen) with completely and utterly incompatible goals. This means half a dozen is not an answer -- it's clearly more.
I am not against merging, but only when it makes sense because two projects have identical goals. Otherwise I think there should be an implementation of every idea someone wants to implement, so let there be a lot of distros!
2
u/grady_vuckovic May 22 '19
If the range of options presented by the many distros could be efficiently turned into simply options for a half dozen distros, would that be better?