Comment by safety1st

People talk about Linux as if it's a monolithic OS and one team in some OS team sport. It's not. It's a kernel.

We've got lots of OSes built on top of that kernel: ChromeOS, Android, and all the distros that are largely different flavors of a GNU/GPL'ed user space, including Fedora, SteamOS etc.

This is fine. If you want a new OS with a "holistic" user space, well Linux is probably the easiest kernel to build it on, but you can't count on it being as free as the GNU user space, because it's still going to be expensive as hell to build, and whoever does it is going to want to recoup their investment many times over.

I think the chance that the GNU user space ever morphs into a "holistic" consumer operating system is basically zero due to how it's licensed, and the key is to understand that this is both fine and necessary.

If you want some other kind of more consumer friendly user space... I guess that starts with convincing some VCs they can make money off of it. They are not going to fund it out of the kindness of their hearts.

Personally I lost interest in consumer operating systems that are designed to limit freedom for the sake of profit, and became an exclusive Debian/Ubuntu/Mint user long ago. If you can be a programmer you can run these operating systems. The tradeoff is you lose the "holistic" and you gain freedom. The two are fundamentally incompatible I'd say so you have to make your choice.