Too many distros?

[hazel]

You might think it's odd for me to be complaining about this. After all, I've often told newbies that one of the strong points of Linux is that there is so much choice. I also like to say that there are many distros because there are many different types of user.

But I recently saw a comment by masontx in another thread which said that there are now 600 distros and this seems to me altogether too much of a good thing. How much real difference can there be between many of these? 100 or even 50 well-chosen ones would probably contain between them all the real variation there is.
It reminds me of a story about T H Huxley, who was asked by a pious lady what he had learned from his scientific studies about his Creator. Huxley, who was an agnostic, answered that if there was a Creator, He seemed to have an inordinate fondness for beetles, judging by the huge number of species of them that He had made.

[oz]

I believe that most of them are pretty much irrelevant for the majority of Linux users, but such a high number of options can indeed cause some confusion for anyone new to Linux. My guess is that for most new users, the top dozen or so distros listed at DistroWatch.com are more than enough options to choose from.

[Peter D]

Many of the distros will be of no interest to most of us. But there are many hobby-ists, programmers, hackers and academics who will find exciting new developments taking place on some of the less well known and less used distros. They have their effect on the community not by being widely used but by inspiring experimentation which, if worthwhile will find its way into the mainstream distros.

And there are lots of us who use, for instance, Ubuntu everyday but li9ke to experiment with something a bit more esoteric when we relax (How sad is that?).

[Jonathan183]

How much real difference can there be between many of these? 100 or even 50 well-chosen ones would probably contain between them all the real variation there is.

I'm not sure that's true, and even if it were there is no real way of driving towards the end goal. Getting distros to merge would be like trying to herd cats ...

[jayd512]

Also, while there are almost 700 dostros, many of those are dormant or discontinued.
From DistroWatch website:

    Number of all distributions in the database: 694
    Number of active distributions in the database: 322
    Number of dormant distributions: 59
    Number of discontinued distributions: 313
    Number of distributions on the waiting list: 260

Admittedly, 300+ is still quite a lot. But many of those are spins on other popular distros. Ubuntu > Xubuntu > Lubuntu.
Specialist distros like GParted or Parted Magic, Plop and Damn Vulnerable Linux...

[cynwulf]

There are indeed far too many blinged up derivative distros around... which offer preinstalled bloat, proprietary software, gui tools and did I mention bloat?

[elija]

If I was to take Debian, install the desktop, artwork and software I use and then remastersys it. Would they count that as a distro? Would you?

I wouldn't and if we ignore those, how many are there?

[cynwulf]

I'm pretty sure that if you simply re-brand, release and distribute, it's counted as a "distro".

[Ted_Work]

Can you actually have too much of a good thing?

[cynwulf]

Well I'm pretty sure that after a few years of a bottle of scotch and a pan load of sausages every night...