Ugh man. You too, Tom? Aren’t we through with this shit? You were the chosen one! How can you disappoint me so badly?

But before jumping to conclusions let’s watchy the video:

Linux is Now Too Fragmented | Many Recent Distros Fail Basic Quality Control

Yes. The fragmentation is a thing. Inevitable when hundreds of thousands of young men from around the globe are playing with the same code. But is it a problem? Does it touch our needs? Do we even need to think about it?

I say No!

You know my stance on the topic: We can never have too much Linux, never have too many distributions! And anyway, who wants to forbid people to experiment and play and try shit out? I think the more the merrier … and the whole broohaha will sort itself out anyway.

Cream rises to the top!

Every beginner, clueless, not very invested in the topic can find a fitting Linux distro inside a couple minutes, the perfect fit in a couple days/weeks. Because cream rises to the top. Just because there are at least 600+ distros available doesn’t mean they are right for you to pick up and install. Just listen to the YouTubers, like Derek and Tom or trust that strange Gerwoman, Orca – and find out most of us “experts” are recommending Linux Mint.

There! You’re done. No problemo.

If you want you will find your way to Manjaro and then maybe to real Arch Linux distros, or something else entirely – all by yourself. And you won’t be discouraged by the number of different distros. One glance is often already enough to see if that one is good for you or not.

Example Orca: She like Arch-based distros and the Mate desktop environment. So I can easily give all the Linuxes without those features a hard pass. Live is so easy once you know what you want. And what you want as a total fresh n00b is Mint, with the lovely Cinnamon desktop environment … or if you’re a tiny bit curious and adventurous you may even start out on Manjaro. Which is also available in Cinnamon flavour.

So don’t fret about the Linux fragmentation, just look at the DistroWatch Top 5 to find your starter pack: 3 of those 5 are easily usable as beginner-frenly distros. Namely #3 and #4, and with reservations also #1. And none of them suffer quality control problems! 🙂

See, Linux distros are just pieces of more or less smart computer code, not human beings. Shit was made to serve us. So in the case of choosing your favourite Linux distro it’s okay – more than just okay – to discriminate. Discriminate hard!

PS: If Orca likes the Cinnamon desktop so much why does she use Mate, eventhough Cinnamon is lovely and Mate ain’t? Simples. I can cobble an environment together on Mate, which works even better for me … personally. Takes me 5 minutes, and most of you won’t like it. And, as I said, Cinnamon is lovely and very usable right outta the box. Mate is not.

And then in all probability a huge chunk of you will leave the GNOME environments and, sooner or later, switch to KDE anyway. As co-blogger Becca did. So Becca and me, we’re both on Manjaro but our systems couldn’t be more diverse if we tried.

See, that is fragmentation of the good kind.