@devil,
arrgh ... I got confused: Yes virtual machines do have their own kernel. We speak about containers!
Up to now containers mostly have been of one distribution. Now LP speaks about a multi-distro container environment ...
But this may result in diverging distributions, because there is no need to consolidate any more....
I didn't read it this way. To me it is absolutly not clear what the effects of this development will be in the long run.
Yes, we are speculating !
But I imagine it leeds or could lead to more modularized systems. They won't differ so much in individual libraries, but in sets of libraries which *could* have an consolidating effect. In this scenario distributions are confronted with developers how bind their application to a *defined* environement. It is then up to the maintainers whether or not they *unbundle* it. That's how I understand the situation. I think this can lead to much unification because now (then) maintainers need good reasons to give up cross distro solutions.
Yes, good reasons for meaningful changes! That is where diversification should head to. Special purpose implementations!
But don't ask me what these will be in the future. I cannot imagine. In the past you would have implemented special Linux systems by using special Linux kernels with special filesystems. But the LP vision needs to have one common kernel and one filesystem only!
My speculation: This LP vision makes it easy to lazily develop any application for just one distribution and not to take care any more it will run on other distros also. Be prepared of upstream developers rejecting siduction patches: The lazy and meaningless multitude will grow