I would like to point out that Linus is against forking the kernel, and his group essentially demands a unified kernel and toolchain (with different distros having different configurations of these pieces).

[Citation Needed]

Torvalds's copy isn't deployed by most people. Red Hat does its own fork (or patchset), as does Ubuntu. TiVo certainly keeps its own copy. Andrew Morton has gone on record saying that a competing fork would be impractical, but I haven't seen anyone "against" such a thing.

If someone really wants to create a dependent sound system, I'm sure Mark Shuttleworth would like to hear from you if you can make the experience better.

Frankly, for most people, they can just use Ubuntu and forget about every other distribution on the desktop.