Reminds me of Sneakers, but the fact is, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is right when he says that “too many people are wasting time creating new linux distributions”: instead of working on existing ones, or on writing drivers, or on creating new applications.
If Linux is ever going to succeed in unseating Windows, it’s supporters are going to need to focus on the things that make it weak, and I’m talking about driver support and application availability, not about the desktop or the distribution, or even the install process.
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I partially agree with you, but having gone through several Linux installations on my own computer (Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu), I noticed there were wide disparities in the aesthetics and documentation that are provided with installation. Driver support and stable, full-featured applications are definitely important areas where Linux needs to focus, but ease of installation (especially alongside Windows, since many people are unable/unwilling to switch completely) is also important.
A flawless install isn’t worth two cents if after it’s installed the user has to learn how to compile source code on the command line in order to get their laptop’s internal wireless card to work. Or their desktop’s flash card reader. Or the DVD burner …
Besides, the fact that there are huge disparities in the install experience, documentation, and aesthetics just goes to prove my point: people are wasting their efforts developing new installers instead of better ones.
this is pretty much the reason why people switch to using BSD variants. I’ve been using OpenBSD now since 2.8 and each release is better. I spend less time doing admin related tasks, and more time creating. When I need support, the man(x) pages are updated and correct, the forums are helpful — sometimes a bit rough but… Try the switch – you just might enjoy it.
IMHO BSD variations fall in the same bucket. Way to much effort being spent in all the wrong places. Just to pick on one minor BSD variant:
If you want to argue that when open source developers wise up, standardize on a few distributions — and develop a common API platform so someone can finally write some usable software — one of them should be BSD, honestly, that just makes you like every other platform geek with a cause
Yeah, OpenBSD is great, so is NetBSD and OpenDarwin, and Ubuntu, and Fedora, and ….
Preaching about your favorite distribution as a comment on this post is kind-of like trying to convince a wanderer in the Sahara that the sand is nicer “on this side of the dune.” What he needs is water. What we need is a standard Open Source platform so we can move on from “look at all the cool things my computer can do” to actually doing cool things. ??Ben Schneiderman — Leonardo’s Laptop ??
I mostly agree with Jaykul, except with his opinion of the BSD variants. Myself, I’ve used slackware when using linux, except when trying out livecd variants. As for the BSD platforms, i’ve used FreeBSD and found it more appropiate for use on the desktop.
The point of the post is correct: way too many people are creating a new variant when there are many more things to be done. Until there is a STABLE way to run apps from one platform to the other, people are going to have a hard time finding the equivalent software of what they use, finding the drivers for hardware they have, or even changing from one distribution to another; when they grow tired of this, the most likely thing they will do is switch back to windows or to macOS. Hell, it’s happened to me, and I’m sure it will happen again in the future