True

then it wont be linux, but a shittily maintained private copy that will fall out of disuse quickly unless they merge all upstream changes without too much oversight (in which case, why bother?) to keep feature parity

At first I thought you meant it’d be a bad fork, but then I realise you meant it’d be a bad fork.

As long as it’s open source and vetted by the public, I don’t see how it could go bad tbh