While reading about the Manjaro non-event I watched this video
Linux Sucks and summarized the contents. Interesting because, in my opinion, he basically says Linux succeeds because people think it is cool.
Bad
3 mins - forking is dumb
5 mins - the display server X.Org is ooooold
7 mins - replacing good working software with nearly identical software ie as Canonical does
9 mins - the names suck, e.g Utopic Unicorn, blame Fedora and Ubuntu
10 mins - heaps of unmanaged developers produce heaps of unmanaged code - who manages it?
12 mins - get paid -> get power -> get wacky
15 mins - trends based on distrowatch numbers
- the landscape changes very quickly in 1-2 years e.g. interest in elementary takes off and passes Fedora;
19 ins - 1-2 releases per distro per year so lots of duplication of effort and lots of boring repackaging that contributes nothing to advancing *nix
Good
22 mins The community - even forks often get rationalised when one fork dominates and the others are rolled back to using it
26 mins - Hardware issues are getting dealt with
27 mins - Wayland display server needs to be right so take time
32 mins - unmanaged developers make code that works even though rationally it
shouldn't
44 mins - Linux is cool