content: Never. Linux has many distributions for many different purposes.  Most novices would be far less comfortable with Red Hat than with Ubuntu or Mint.  Similarly, a highly technical person who liked traditional Unix would find Slackware much more acceptable than SuSE, which is set up to have a somewhat prettier experience.  This does not count the numerous specialized distributions such as all the anti-virus live CDs you can boot off of to help your computer in an emergency, since most of those run some version of Linux on top of a bare-bones distribution. There may be too many distributions around, but there will never be a single, unified thrust.  It's better that way, considering how versatile it is.  While some of the BSD's may be more unified, you also have to do much of the customization on your own, at the very least.  It's certainly more customizable than the mess of Windows versions and Windows Server versions. I think this situation would be helped a lot if there was more unified binary capability and a significantly better install system.  As-is everything that isn't specifically distributed by the distro maker can be an ordeal to install for a novice, and it just shouldn't be like that, nor should it be that a software producer puts out two or three packages for a few very specific distros and versions (e.g. offering for download, say, a .deb for Ubuntu 16.04 and .rpm SuSE 5.0, and tough shit if you're on Debian, Mint, Red Hat, or Ubuntu versions other than 16.04).  But that's an entirely different kettle of fish.