Oh No, Too Many Distros?

Fossforce's Christine Hall said recently that those declaring "too many distros" are just spreading FUD and then ran a poll. Their results were surprising...too surprising. So, I ran my own poll. Turns out, my results are surprising too.

Fossforce's poll showed a majority of respondents said there were too many distros, 29% thought the number is about right, and 19% said there were too few. They were "flabbergasted" and "surprised" as was I. The results had to be an anomaly. So, I ran my own poll to see what I'd get. My results show no anomaly at Fossforce after all.

My poll also found that a majority of visitors to my website think there is just too much choice.  I asked a simple question with only two answers. Given the topic of "Too Many Distros" and the choices of only "yes" or "no," 63% of participants said yes. 37% said no.  Visitors to my site are split almost equally into three camps:  little experience, moderately experienced, and well experienced or better.

Folks are arguing both sides, but I think Linux Migrante said it best:

We want a number of distros that is easy to handle? Then, let's make Linux closed source, hand it to a small number of companies, and give our freedom up.

That's the way to go! Who wants freedom anyway?

This debate rises from the ash heap every few years and the number of users believing there are too many distributions seems to be on the rise, however, so are the number of distros and users.