There are so many distributions because people are working off of open source code, which gives them the freedom to modify and publish as they see fit. It’s impossible to make a fork or Windows or macOS in the same way.
And yes, they can differ a lot; [Elementary](https://elementary.io/) and [Lubuntu](https://lubuntu.me/) show how different distros can provide very different experiences, in terms of how they look and feel, what kind of hardware they run on, and what you’re able to do with them.
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