4 ms·

The chart clearly shows that there is a lot of proliferation, which is confusing to a lot of new users. Imagine what would be possible if all these fine develop

The chart clearly shows that there is a lot of proliferation, which is confusing to a lot of new users. Imagine what would be possible if all these fine developers would focus on two or three distributions. Ps. I am proud that I was a paid co-developer of the very first distribution listed ;).

pjmlp 13y ago
Well, for any of us old enough, this is the revival of UNIX wars.
- matt__rose 13y ago
  Not quite. The UNIX wars were basically "Hardware" wars. Basically, you bought your workstation from Sun, or HP, or SGI, or IBM or whoever, and you got the version of UNIX that was shipped for that hardware. You could compile your own BSD (/usr/ucb) or GNU (/usr/local) utils if you didn't want to pay a king's ransom for a compiler, but basically, the idea of running any type of software on any hardware, a la Linux or OpenBSD, hadn't really caught on. I know it's cool to be all blase about this, but this is different.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    That is only part of the picture. Many of us bear scars from trying to write portable software across commercial UNIX systems, while discovering that POSIX only covered part of the required features, and even the POSIX ones had implementation defined behaviours. Not to mention the wonders of each system having their own UI toolkits, besides each XWindows flavour. I did it between AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Xenix, DG/UX.
jzelinskie 13y ago
>Imagine what would be possible if all these fine developers would focus on two or three distributions. You don't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent distros? In a way, creating a distro is like contributing to all the other distros at the same time. What makes them fine developers is their drive to innovate and try new things so that one day the status quo can improve. Who knows: if all those developers worked on the same few distributions, they may have crashed and burned.
- danieldk 13y ago
  You don't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent distros? Sometimes. But there is also a lot of 'let's take Ubuntu and change the default desktop/wallpaper/DVD package set/...'. Also, it's not as if developers in major distributions such as Debian don't have room to experiment with different approaches. For instance, in Debian, the default init system discussion rages. The most promising candidates are already available in Debian itself.
mattl 13y ago
You were a paid developer on MCC?

pjmlp 13y ago

Well, for any of us old enough, this is the revival of UNIX wars.

matt__rose 13y ago
Not quite. The UNIX wars were basically "Hardware" wars. Basically, you bought your workstation from Sun, or HP, or SGI, or IBM or whoever, and you got the version of UNIX that was shipped for that hardware. You could compile your own BSD (/usr/ucb) or GNU (/usr/local) utils if you didn't want to pay a king's ransom for a compiler, but basically, the idea of running any type of software on any hardware, a la Linux or OpenBSD, hadn't really caught on. I know it's cool to be all blase about this, but this is different.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  That is only part of the picture. Many of us bear scars from trying to write portable software across commercial UNIX systems, while discovering that POSIX only covered part of the required features, and even the POSIX ones had implementation defined behaviours. Not to mention the wonders of each system having their own UI toolkits, besides each XWindows flavour. I did it between AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Xenix, DG/UX.

jzelinskie 13y ago

>Imagine what would be possible if all these fine developers would focus on two or three distributions. You don't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent distros? In a way, creating a distro is like contributing to all the other distros at the same time. What makes them fine developers is their drive to innovate and try new things so that one day the status quo can improve. Who knows: if all those developers worked on the same few distributions, they may have crashed and burned.

danieldk 13y ago
You don't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent distros? Sometimes. But there is also a lot of 'let's take Ubuntu and change the default desktop/wallpaper/DVD package set/...'. Also, it's not as if developers in major distributions such as Debian don't have room to experiment with different approaches. For instance, in Debian, the default init system discussion rages. The most promising candidates are already available in Debian itself.

mattl 13y ago

You were a paid developer on MCC?