Maybe nowadays, with Elon's imbecility so publicly visible.
I've run Arch for close to 10 years, and was pretty jazzed by Musk in the early days of his presiding over Tesla and Space X. Then again, I was barely an adult at the time, and I hadn't yet come across the first reports of terrible working conditions and his overall shittyness as a manager/exec.
A lot of people forget how overwhelmingly, insanely popular Musk was with way too online nerds. He was reddit's golden child for years. Part of this is that whenever Disney started releasing the Marvel movies, beginning with Iron Man, Musk was front and center as the core inspiration for Tony Stark (yes, I'm serious, the director and Robert Downey Jr. basically went on record as saying as much) and he fucking milked that shit. It's also important to understand that for a time he was seen as a forward looking entrepreneur whose business was "going to help save the planet by making electric cars so popular that every car manufacturer would switch to electric vehicle production to keep up." If Musk was a genius at one thing, it was manipulating public perception of himself and his enterprises. It took years of him being a thin-skinned weirdo and massive corporate tool to undo the amount of positive sentiment he'd built for himself and Tesla.
you literally have to run installation script or follow instructions from arch wiki. slap some de to it and you're good. doesn't take a smart person to do.
to properly maintain it for longer periods forever though, takes some more skill.
Chromium was, however, a Google product from the very beginning that Google open-sourced themselves. Linux is too big with too many non-profit and for-profit companies and tons of independent individuals participating in its development for one person or company to control it outright.
I mean, sure, for profit companies like Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical do have some influence but not so much that you can’t ignore their contributions if you don’t like them.
For example, some ubuntu based distros (i.e Mint) circumvent snap from being installed the ubuntu way (without asking) because it goes against their philosophy. And if that’s still too much Ubuntu for you, there’s a Debian Edition of mint. And if that’s still too same-y for you, there are dozens of other distros based on slackware, rhel/fedora, arch, Gentoo, etc. There even are Linux distros without GNU.
So, unless Muskiboy buys Linus Torvalds, I think the Linux community could easily ignore him building his own xOS.