Is it really that fragmented? There's essentially RedHat, Debian, and Slackware. At the level of app development for servers, everything seems pretty compatible.
As a desktop user I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical.
I'm sure that people who work at the OS level see a lot of fragmentation and headaches, but to their credit it's largely hidden from the masses.
I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization, the movement is towards picking an OS per app, not an OS to run your entire business on.
And SUSE enterprise is another actually popular version, at least what I've seen in the telecom industry. So that's at least 4.
Then, there's Arch which is popular with enthusiasts, and Ubuntu has become sufficiently different from Debian that it requires thinking when switching from one to the other. Gentoo seems to be getting less and less popular, but it's still kicking.
And yes as the parent post said, it's the unexpected differences that are stressful: different init systems, selinux vs apparmour vs nothing, different locations of config files, different whole /etc structures, that sort of things. The distros are diverging fast, and switching from RHEL to Ubuntu nowadays feels like it's a whole new system.
> I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical.
So you went from downstream to upstream and the view was largely the same. Yeah that's expected.
> I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization
FreeBSD has had container based virtualization for 15 years. I know it's the Brittany Spears of the linux dev group ATM, but I doubt it and Docker are as big a thing as it seems now. Container based virtualization is great, but it's not a substitute for a real hypervisor. As more people realize the last fact, the shine will wear off.
As a desktop user I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical.
I'm sure that people who work at the OS level see a lot of fragmentation and headaches, but to their credit it's largely hidden from the masses.
I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization, the movement is towards picking an OS per app, not an OS to run your entire business on.