Quazatron

One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.

There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.

New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.

As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.

Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.

Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games.

Some people actively avoid multiplayer games to avoid obnoxious, entitled kids.

My feeling on this is that or the “general public desktop” use case we have to defer to corporate supported distros (RedHat, Ubuntu, Suse), because they have to work with hardware vendors that are typically averse to the idea of sharing driver code, and you have to make sure your desktop runs smoothly on your average PC.

I don’t see it happening, honestly.

Exactly. I need Debian, Alpine, Manjaro, OpenWRT, MoOde Audio Player, Lakka and SteamOS.

They all serve different use cases. That’s the beauty of it, the utter flexibility to turn it into whatever you need because you can.

I’ve seen this opinion voiced quite a few times for the last 28 or so years I’ve been a Linux user.

Guess what? It’s free and open source software. People work on what they feel like when they feel like if they feel like. You can’t mandate “let’s just have a couple of distros, think of the public!”. It doesn’t work like that. Yes, life is not perfect.

Do we? Who’s we?