On Friday 01 November 2002 01:19, gilson redrick wrote:
... In doing so, they are loaded with extraneous garbage which not only annoys, but also limits the power user.
You just ruffled one of my favorite feathers ¿-).
I should have said explicitly, that is a blurb from the "corelinux" homepage. Reading about that distribution made me think - how viable it is to pack the product of almost entire open source community in one distribution in a workable manner? SuSE I believe was the first one to distribute on so many CDs. Now all major distributions offer 5-7 CD packages. Hopefully, the "united linux" should make the problem easier - there would be some standard to comply. But I will argue it will not solve the problem, but contribute to it. Remember "The cathedral and the bazaar"? If bazaar is the development model, how can you expect that implementation would be cathedral-like? To extend the metaphor, I would compare the efforts of linux distros to a bunch of evangelists preaching on that bazaar. Now, you'd expect the unitedlinux to be the ultimate linux, like sort of ideal linux distro up there in plato's heaven. But wait, we will also have desktop linux, and certainly there will be more to come. unitedLinux is for business. Now we shall wait what the redhat powerhouse and other distributions left out will come up with, specifically for business. TheFirstTrustLinux? OffShoreLinux? And what will we have for windoze converts? TGPlinux? We all have been expecting that big distributions would bring us something organised, integrated and working. Like somebody else have said, I also used 7.3 the longest. From then on, it was escalating: waiting for the next distribution to solve the problems of the previous ones. Meanwhile, the problems, most often, are not those of the distribution itself, but of the included sofware. Now there will be even more distributions from the same company. And how many more linux distributions there are since 7.3? All born from the same dissatisfaction with the existing ones. My argument is this: we are actually witnessing linux distributions succumbing to the bazaar model, not the other way around. Any comments? Serguei