[throwaway7356]

> I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example.

I don't think so: there are Debian forks that aspire to fight against the horrors of GNOME, systemd, Wayland and Rust, but they don't attract people to work on them.

[bradfa]

That there are so many indicates to me the opposite. There are lots of people who want to work on that kind of thing, just they all have slightly different opinions as to which part is the part they’re fighting against, hence so many different forks.

The forks are all volunteer projects (except Ubuntu), so having slightly different opinions isn’t considering capitalism as a driving force.