An aside regarding the details of your analogy. I have to contest that command economies can be more efficient than free markets. Please note that this does not mean that free markets are perfectly efficient: they aren't. But even if we dismiss the outsized impacts that leadership personality can play in determining the functioning of a command economy, they cannot be as relatively efficient as a free market.

We need to define what it means to be efficient: I use efficiency to mean the measure of how market producers meet the demands of market consumers. In these cases a central planning authority cannot obtain enough actionable data from the market nor can it act on it in a timely enough way as to actually meet that definition of efficiency. Individual consumers have differing wants and needs: differing to the point that you would be hard pressed to define the difference between what constitutes a want vs a need in all cases. Even the best central planners would be hard pressed to deal with such complexity. You may be able to use prior consumption numbers to plan the next cycle, but things change. Also adoption of new technology (not just computer technology) is difficult to understand. When the car is invented does the command economy order a bunch to see how it plays out? Does it order none because there were no prior demands expressed? Can it even be invented or manufactured because the likelihood of seeing it even get considered so small as to make it not worth it... or needed enabling technologies like, say, better lathes (or some such thing) not developed for a car that may exist because there is no purpose for it now, or because there is no reward for pursuing such a path to the inventor? How does one set prices or does one dictate consumption as well? Fail in pricing and you have shortages for one thing and over-abundances for another. This goes on and on. And again, these are the questions outside graft and ill-will from the central authorities.

Free markets on the other hand distribute the penalties and rewards based purely on how well a producer meets a consumers requirements (note that this is different from producing a perfect world for the consumer... consumers have a limit of what is acceptable, so you may buy something you wish was much better/cheaper/etc than it was, but you still concluded that you'd be worse off having the money rather than the product so you traded... a need was met). An individual producer can focus on a an individual area of need for specific consumers much better than a central authority can; and if the existing producers fail some consumers, an opportunity for other producers to enter the marketplace exists. If a producer meets consumer demand in a way that maximizes the resources that production itself consumes, they have the resources to continue to serve the market; if they fail to meet consumer demand in a resource efficient manner, they cease to be in the market.

Profit is the measure of efficiency of meeting a consumer demand: you have bad profits, you're not efficient in some way, good profits and you are. Rewards and "punishments" from the market itself coordinate resources and do so quickly and without needing to wait for the next 5 year plan. In command economies, if consumer needs aren't met, rarely are there any bad outcomes for the producers (the state). You can't choose to buy from the other guy because there is no other guy. And to reward good outcomes? Why bother when you control the rewards and the penalties either way?

Anyway, to bring it all home, fragmentation in the Linux world is really about this random walk of producers trying to meet needs: the interesting question is, "who's needs"? Ubuntu is shooting for customers: those not interested in building the operating systems/tools and those that just want to use it. Red Hat is similar except for a narrower set of consumers. But, say, Debian (to some degree), or even better Slackware (a personal old favorite)... who is the consumer? I would argue that often times it is the developer/maintainer that is actually the consumer: they consume their leisure time and make other consumer expenses because of their desire to engage in the activity of developing or maintaining a distribution; OK, maybe less so Debian than Slackware, but I think the point still applies. Many of these distributions don't exist because an entrepreneur was trying to reach an underserved market... they exist because the developer/maintainer set out to achieve personal goals. As such a distribution cannot fail on adoption rates or by using monetary success measures since the reward/punishment is really a matter of developer satisfaction in the pursuit. That's also not to say that these personal pursuits cannot also be commercial pursuits or that developers don't want to see their work adopted by others, but the primary motivation will not weed out less successful distributions because they are actually successful for what the makers tried to accomplish. And in that sense, they are meeting a need and that is actually efficient... just not in the way you may desire or expect.