Sure. But unless you're deploying custom Linux builds, what does that get you, exactly? I have a number of packages on my computer I don't use, and I am not being hindered by their existence. I instead use my brain cycles for creating new software & systems, not retooling the existing one to no end.
edit: Please understand that I'm not saying a fully customizable Linux doesn't have its place. It absolutely does. But when you're trying to crank stuff out, having to stop and tweak/fix your system simply gets in the way. Well, it gets in my way, at least. :-)
Some people want or need a tailored experience that they don't have to configure much if at all. e.g. making Linux suitable for near-real time audio work, restricting Linux to a set of well-tested stable packages for high uptime, making it as close to a standards desktop experience where the expectations are set by Windows and MacOS, making it sandbox absolutely everything by default because you have reasons to be extremely security-conscious, etc
Many of these goals are incompatible or at least unfriendly to each other, so you need tailored experiences. And that's fine.
Yes, in the sense, that if you want, you can eventually make it the way you want.
No in the sense, that others won't do it for you; they will make linux distribution the way they consider it best, not how you consider it the best.
So if you want to pick and choose the components the way you want and not the way the distributions consider the best, be ready to put in the manhours.
I guess my confusion is your initial statement "Lets not customize it then" followed by you proposing fully customized installs, and I'm not sure if I missed your point.
I only brought up trusted vendors because it seemed that you also want repositories of customization scripts, and I don't disagree, but it shifts the trust from the people making your operating system to you reviewing a bunch of scripts to get the system you want.
I'm making a point that people don't want that at all. That will absolutely cause analysis paralysis, there would be too many possibilities, and it would continue this idea that Linux is hard and elitist when it really shouldn't have to be that way.
You misunderstand. I am saying that all that effort was spent chasing the long tail of compatibility, which is valuable if compatibility is one of your big selling points.
However, one need not go to such extremes to get a good amount of compatibility, just don't have a policy of breaking ABIs constantly the way Linux Desktop does.
It's all about what you want in an OS. MacOS for example is very much one size fits all. For someone like me who wants to tune the nuts and bolts of the system is frustrating.
Windows is better at this and Linux of course shines depending on which distro you pick. I consider each distro its own OS. For the same reason gnome doesn't work for me (and thus PopOS doesn't) but KDE and i3 do.
But other people have other priorities. And the software you want to run heavily factors into it.
Why do the 600 existing distributions not do that?
The way Linux systems are constructed is by gluing together a giant pile of disparately developed software, usually with fragile scripts, and trying to pretend that it is a robust and integrated system. Consequently, they require huge amounts of effort to alter, which will all be undone or in conflict with the next update. So what do you do when you get a Linux system working the way you want? You make your own distro, because it's the only way to keep it like that.
This is precisely the problem with Linux. Everyone wants to work on cool kernel-level stuff or daemon-level stuff; nobody wants to bother with the tedious, unglamorous last-mile work of actually delivering a polished user experience around all of that cool stuff.
You can make Linux look like anything you want. If what you want is a clone of your old OS, well, I can't help your aesthetic taste, but I can at least make you happy.
Extensive customisability is also confusing. Linux distros are great(i started running slackware to get rid of the virus problems that I had on windows). For non-superuser distros, the developer should remove the extensive customisability. The desktop environment for example, u get a lot options from fluxbox to kde to TabWindow Manager. Those kind of too confusing options should be removed in non-superuser distros. The procedure of installation of additional software, windows wins hands down. There aren't too many types. All a user has to do is to click on the setup file of most software. In linux, if a distro doesn't have a package manager, then learning how to install different packages from rpms to tar.gz to whatever, takes time. And even worse, some apps come with the tag "compile it yourself".
Part of Operations is weighing new and shiny features versus the maintenance cost of supporting them. You can make an amazing amount of work for yourself by deciding you are going to run the latest and greatest, and becoming the maintainer of your own custom distribution. My shop is on the small side for deciding to bite that off though, so we try to leverage Ubuntu's expertise in doing that whenever possible.
i don’t need all the features of a complete OS. i only need a small set of features, and i want them to work in a specific way.
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