Soller: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc

To expand on that, there are three groups involved here, not two:

1. Users, who don't care about the technical stuff as long as the computer does what they need it to do. Any change, even a security upgrade, is unpopular with users, as there's always the risk that the computer will stop doing what they need it to do on a change; users, however, do want some changes, because they see what the developers can make computers do, and decide they want that.
2. Developers, who find new ways to make the computer do useful stuff. Developers are keen on some forms of change, because changing things is how you find a new way to make the computer do useful stuff.
3. Operations, who keep the computer restricted to only doing what the users want it to do, and not doing things that the users don't want. Operations like different forms of change to developers, as they want changes that reduce the chance of the compuer doing things the users don't want it to do.

Distributions that survive end up being a compromise between the three. They update fast enough to keep developers happy; they're good enough at stopping things that you don't want to have happen to keep operations happy; they make the computer do enough useful things that users are happy. But note that distributions are not essential in this set - they just happen to be one form of compromise between the three groups that has historically worked out well enough to survive. Containers are another - especially combined with CI - where you build a complete FS image of the "application" and run it; you regularly update that image, and all is good.

Basically, things go wrong when the desires of the three groups are unbalanced - if a distribution becomes "this is what operations want", then users and developers leave it to ossify; if a distribution becomes "this is what users want", it loses developers and operations; if it becomes "this is what developers want", it loses users and operations. And as every real individual is a combination of users, developers and operations to various degrees, the result of such ossification is a gradual loss of people to work on the distribution.

As soon as distributions see themselves as "in opposition" to developers (or operations, or users), they're at risk - this is about finding a balance between developers' love of using the best technologies they know about, and operations' love of not bringing in tech for the sake of it that results in users getting value from the distribution.