Such a waste of time and manpower creating all these forks. I wish folks spent time scratching their itch by writing great software for Linux instead of trying to reinvent the same wheel. And yet folks will continue to fork platform trying to solve problem that doesn't exist.
Since someone intentionally created each fork, doing so was demonstrably not a "waste of time and manpower". If people perceive a problem, it demonstrably exists; whether or not other people also experience the same problem is scarcely relevant.
Many of the forks weren't/aren't serious anyway and the majority died out pretty soon, they shouldn't be seen as competition or wasted time. If you just want to experiment and don't want to pay attention to some community guidelines etc., then forking is better. It is exactly this freedom I love about Linux or open source in general.
A distro with enough options to satisfy the creators of every fork would be an unholy mess. 1,000 separate contributors are very good at adding every option under the sun to a piece of software. But reducing choices to the point where you can just burn a CD and "install Debian" is anti-parallelizable.
I think 10 different distributions are fine. 1000 distributions are not. Fedora is good for Gnome, Ubuntu is good for Unity, OpenSUSE is good for KDE, Arch Linux is good for minimalism, etc. All these distributions are good at something radically different which is fine but I want to use a different theme, let's create a new distribution or some driver didn't work on my system, so I am going to create a new distribution is hardly a valid reason.
For me freedom means two things (1) contribute to up stream project (2) write free software.
