MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin [LWN.net]

MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 17, 2010 15:32 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin by xanni
Parent article: MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Because distros having multiple different distros was a bloody stupid idea to begin with. Fragmentation is a Bad Thing. Fragmentation in the UNIX market is what allowed the rise of Windows NT. It makes software development harder and it makes the deployment harder. A lot of documentation is useless, because it's written for a distro other than the one you are using. Tons of effort are wasted because different developers package the same packages over and over and over for different distros. And this also leads to stupid bugs like the debian openssl disaster or the recent bug in OpenSuse's screen locking thingy. Not to mention the fact that having fewer distros would make it a lot easier for users to pick one (Just watch the talk "The Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz, you can find it via a search engine of your choice (no pun intended)).

My personal belief is that eliminating 99.9% of all distros would increase linux adoption massively. And while we're at it, we might as well kill gtk+ in order to give developers a uniform platform to the develop for (Qt, that is). Sometimes less really is more.

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MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 17, 2010 16:21 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And choice? Choice is bad.

Thank goodness there is no central authority with the ability to do what you propose. Having multiple distros is a wonderful way to experiment with different packaging and system administration methods, or to customize the OS for particular domains. Yes, a lot are derivative or boring: but a lot aren't.

MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 18, 2010 21:52 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

And choice? Choice is bad.
So it is, if there is to much of it. And having literally thousands of distros is definitely too much.

Having multiple distros is a wonderful way to experiment with different packaging and system administration methods,
No, it's not. A uniform linux distribution for the desktop wouldn't stop anyone from developing, say, a new package manager or system administration tool. It would actually make things easier, because it would be possible to build and package a new tool so that *everyone* (almost) can take advantage of it. Imagine that: people could just use system-config-httpd to configure their apache web server. And if they don't like it, they remove it and install YaST instead. Having a uniform desktop linux distribution would actually give you *more* freedom, since you won't be constrained any longer by the selection of packages your distro has made for you.

or to customize the OS for particular domains.
Yes, this is why i spoke about eliminating 99.9% of all linux distributions and not about eliminating each one but one. I do see a point in having stuff like OpenWrt for embedded devices, or MeeGo for mobile devices. But having Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva, Fedora, Mint, MEPIS, Sidux etc. at the same time is utter nonsense.