I have wondered for quite a while why there are 5-10 new distros coming out each week.

I love Mac and Cheese, but would would be stymied to see hundreds of brands on the grocery shelves.

I understand the drive to make thinks better and to customize things. :-)

Many of the new distros are simply individuals or small groups of enthusiasts designing something to meet their own preferences. Some are from persons who want to build a distro to learn how to build a distro. Some are built to serve well a niche market that has highly specific needs (Sonar and DSL would be good examples of this).

In my opinion, far too many are based on pettiness and ephemera, that is, on the appearance of the desktop (and by that I do not mean the selection of desktop environment, but rather what the desktop environment looks like) or the choice of, say, the default media player.

The beauty of the Linux ecosphere is, that if the larger community sees no utility in a distro, it will quickly recede into the shadows.

Thanks.

I had to look up the definition of 'ephemera.'

Learned a new word. :-)

A will o' the wish is ephemeral, if that helps.

One distro that was created by a person scratching an itch was Crunchbang. The developer created it because it did what he wanted. It caught on big time. He has since abandoned it because he has a life and ran out of time, but it's a good example of an individual's personal taste leading to be a welcomed addition to the ecosphere.

I remember trying it when it was new; it wasn't to my taste because it had no taskbar/panel, but it was nice piece of work.

Most of the so-called distributions are nothing more than a main disto with a GUI configured to someone's personal preference.

Here is a new distro. Debian with Openbox (including a custom pink colour scheme), Kaffeine and Mousepad!

Typical of the mass of "distributions" and nothing people cannot do on their own with the "base" distro in a few minutes.

A true distro is compiled from source & supplies a package management system.

Most (so called) distros are just someones choice of WM/DE & packages with a different desktop background!