I agree indeed with both of you! I'm a bit disappointed that there are so many distros out when the Linux community started out as a "community" which, should have resulted in alot more uniformity than we have. The biggest examples being the package handling of course. Other's like sysv style init as opposed to a more bsd-ish style like slack. I would love to see a conversion/translation standard that would add just a little more flexibility with the .rpm .deb to even tarball area. It's unlikely and unfortunately my opinion is that everyone is going to keep splintering off into thier own distro arenas. The positive is that the user has alot of choice for thier need though, unlike windows' limited home, workstation or server release. But even that makes some happy, so it comes down to choice and how much things really bother a person. Oh well...My ranting is over and most of it i'll forget as soon as I hit the submit button...

aye, i think yea el_felipe has a point there, at least from a certain perspective. i have wondered about this too...

i think a more suitable example would be the BSD family instead of Windows for comparision.
maybe it's one of the BSDs you'd like

in any case, as i understand it, Linux is only the kernel. the rest are packages added as the distro manager sees fit.

i stay with linux only coz of the GPL(aahhh idealism...). i for one would be more comfy with a little more coherence.

actually i don't really know too much about the difference between the SysV and BSD-type stuff, except maybe when i want to configure the rc.d stuff and the organization of the man pages(not even sure about this part)?

and as for slack sticking to unix... hmm.. i have never tried a true-blue unix, so i don't really know. but i have tried FreeBSD... and there are some fundamental differences.

I revel in this chaos. Its more fun this way when every fifth component of your system is out of date in three weeks.
I fiddle with HP-UX machines at work. Our mailserver is an AIX box, and doesn't Solaris count after all? Admitedly this is all at the user level. Largely, nearly everything that matters to me is the same.

-Cheers,

Finegan

I completely agree, finegan and gui10

I didn't ever imagine to say unices OS based servers lack coherence, it couldn't be admissible. Maybe they are more standardized because they are more near to their commercial parents... who knows.

I'm talking about the end user, (not necessarily destined to eternal newbiedom beacuse of his limited capacities...), the "desktop" world.

So if servers have a more definite and somewhat "standard" fundamentals, the same can't be said about workstations or desktops, where this need is even more urgent, I think.

And microsoft teaches us it is the desktop user who decides wether a product like Win2k can be a threat to linux and the other unices..!

Thanks for your posts... ciao!

el felipe

one thing that i find generally confusing about the whole system, GPL, GNU etc... is that well.. who IS in charge? no one inparticular i know, but then who has the ability to set a standard? Thing is, every distribution HAS set it's standard, and thinks that everyone else will, or rather should, copy it. Most differences are very minor but if you're releasing a package then it must be compliant to somethign or other... and if a very small difference will stop one version working oin another distro, then that's a whole extra release needed. it's veyr daft really, and it certainly would make sense for whoever it may concern to actaully just decide on file structures etc... those are the sort of things that can be laid to rest really... things like Suse not using /opt would be a start...

but then that's the way linux is.. it's very much in it's boom at the moment, as so often is the way through history. in the mid 60's you were very hard pushed to find and cross compatability for ANY mainframe computer. even the same languages (ForTran, Pascal etc...) were different per machine... yet from that mess, a good standard (good... well...) of x86 has generally become a standard for desktop systems, with a few RISC variants here and there. And so it goes with other things. Languages are VASTLY more portable now than they were, all from the community initlaly diversifying and coming together again, through various reasons, such as financial, economic, companies going bust, people being skint... (erm.. yeah...).

I don't think it's a case of 'let nature take it's way' by any means but it would be beneficial i think to let branches go off and hopefully come back with somethign useful to say. More immediately tho, the standards are being much more developed in many areas, such as 2 toolkits as opposed to many less good ones.

but then how WOULD suse stop using /opt?? seems to me like a D-Day kinda affair, making software obselete by default and such like. Maybe it'd be easy. but then beign easy in theory and easy in practise are different things.

I am new to Linux; besides liking the concept and wanting to support anything but windows, I was *really sick* of all the crashes and virus problems with the latest crap from Redmond.
I knew nothing of Linux, so I bought Mandrake 8.1 after reading it was probably the easiest install. I tried to be realistic about my command line skills.
I found that Mandrake was all it was advertised, VERY easy to install. I learned all about the importance of HD partitions along the way, and after trying it on an old packard bell first I now have it as the only OS on a new computer, lots of space.
I do have to say that the install for the internet connection is buggy; I suggest that anyone that is going through the initial install skip it altogether, and then configure it with linuxconf, the one that worked for me. I have some issues with drivers but I know that it is surely something I have messed with, as I am learning how to install them and test them with the shell instead of the GUI. I am pleased with the result of knowing more of what is really going on with my computer, instead of trusting those damm wizards from MS.
Anyway, I liked Mandrake. I bought a book about linux that came with Redhat disks too, so I may try that just for fun, and then write another comparison.

hiker

bluecadet,

as I can remember, SuSE using /opt draw inspiration from slackware (where Volkerding put KDE and Gnome).

Yes one of the things would be a definite place to put things in, this also would avoid hundreds of symlinks...

el felipe

i could have *sworn* that i wrote a response to this like two weeks ago... apparently the fact that i didn't get around to it is one of those little nuggets that fell out of my brain thanks in the holiday rush... new years didn't help either - i have a stretch of about 16 hours from just before midnite until the next day that are a complete blank.

anyway... i believe what i was going to post two weeks ago was something along the lines that NO ONE is in charge... that was the whole point of the GPL - to prevent anyone from getting in charge. no one is any more in charge than the next person is... it's a bit of a weird concept... but it is the way things are designed to be with the GPL.

the whole concept was that if you liked a standard or a program... follow it or use it, and if you don't like it, change it however you want to. if you don't like a standard, like posix, you can't really change it, but you can try to replace it if you think you can design something better that people will follow. that's exactly how linux got started. linus didn't like what existed, so he just made his own... he's only in "charge" because he's the best at managing it right now... if you read much of the kernel development mail, you'd be surprised how much he encourages people to fork the code. the way he manages things causes a lot of short-term bickering and stability problems, but in the longer term, it's a very fast and effective way to accomplish as much as possible.

a lot of people, esp. companies and the such, don't understand the way linux develops... it's not a process that has an end product... it's an evolution... there's never going to be a point where the developers will just stop and say "ok... it's good enough, now let's just leave it like that forever"