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Wrong order?

Posted Apr 1, 2012 7:55 UTC (Sun) by renox (subscriber, #23785)
Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)

Given that distributions can't even agree on one packaging format (well in theory they agreed to use RPM, in practice this is meaningless), how could the distributions manage to have a stable desktop Linux?

So apparently 1) distributions don't really care.

And if stability was such a big point, 2) why the stable desktop like XFce have not seen a bigger usage compared to the 'cool' desktop (KDE, Gnome) and their constant 'big bang' re-invention?

Given (1) and (2), I also think that this is hopeless.

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Wrong order?

Posted Apr 1, 2012 12:29 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

in theory they agreed to use RPM, in practice this is meaningless

Within LSB, RPM was supposed to be the distribution format for packages. Nobody ever said that a LSB-compliant distribution would need to actually use RPM for its own packages; it would only need to be able to install LSB-compliant third-party packages that came in RPM format, which is an entirely different ball-game.

Wrong order?

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:26 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]

And besides, rpm was chosen because at that time the most popular distributions were using it, not because its the best. And some distibutions like Debian refused to "downgrade". As it happens, now distributions using deb are more popular (And I'm glad about it ;))