Comment Developers like a solid platform (Score 1) 140
...that makes neat features accessible to both developers and users.
And by "solid platform", I mean something that demonstrates a consistent philosophy and design from the UI and APIs down through the kernel and the hardware.
There should also be a specification (like Multi-Media PC was for Microsoft in the 90s) of what a minimum hardware configuration should look like for a given platform (mobile, desktop, etc) to support most of the apps users will find enticing.
If you build a consistent, feature-stable platform with neat features the app developers will come. Maybe not in droves, but you will start seeing some very interesting new ideas and apps written by the sort of people who do NOT like to tinker with kernel options in grub.cfg or have to dig through
Tim Berners Lee wrote the first web browser on the NeXT platform which had a tiny user base. Now Ubuntu is trying to compete with iOS, which is the progeny of NeXT.