>So do happily, some do begrudgingly because they do not have the manpower to opt for alternatives.
Perhaps, but is it really that hard to just stay with the older init services (sysv, upstart)? Slackware still has sysv AFAIK.
Also, if they really wanted they could team up with other distros to share the workload.
As for Gnome, this simply isn't true: Linux Mint proved this by hosting not one, but two renegade DEs: Cinnamon and MATE. And KDE and Xfce are still around, and not hard for distros to adopt if they choose; they just don't, they'd prefer to jump on the Gnome3 bandwagon for some odd reason.
>This means that unless you have the deep economic pockets to rival Red Hat, you basically have to follow along.
Again, Slackware seems to disprove this. Perhaps also Gentoo. Neither of these are large distros.
>End result is that whatever comes out of Fedora sets the de-facto standard in the Linux ecosystem these days, for better or worse (imo, the latter).
The existence of all the Debian-derived distros, using apt, seems to partially disprove this, but I get your point and I agree about it being worse. I really wish the Linux ecosystem had perhaps 3 or 4 large players, but each roughly equal to each other, instead of there being one commercial behemoth with too much power. Unfortunately, while Debian seems to be holding its own somewhat, SUSE went down the tubes ages ago and hasn't done any kind of power-wielding or standard-setting, and Ubuntu has tried and failed and is turning into just a Debian respin.
