ownCloud 7 released

First of all you simply cannot run multiple entire OS images on resource constrained systems. Try that on a raspberry pi, for instance. OS images and distribution fit different needs and saying that one model is better than the other without reference to the environment unfortunately makes little sense, IMHO.

Secondly, the whole matter goes down to the desire to put something in common or not. Distributions try to put as much as possible in common (libraries and infrastructure) among their applications, in order to squeeze the best possible performance out of the system resources and maximize security (by relying on a single trusted version of each lib). Putting something in common necessarily implies some management overhead. The OS image philosophy puts nothing in common and replicates everything. In this way they minimize the management overhead but they pay a price in resource waste. It is not much different from living in a detached house or in a flat. In the first case you spend more, but you do not need to coordinate with anybody. Now, distros are nothing but a means to formalize how coordination should happen and to minimize the overhead inherent in sharing. Do they succeed? Some would say that to a sufficiently good extent they do. Could they do it better? Probably. Should they /all/ do it in /exactly/ the same way? This is not an important question, because it will simply not happen. Humans like to experiment their own way as long as they have the freedom to do so. In fact, even the OS image approach fails when you consider kernels and hypervisors that are not 'identical' in their interfaces.

Last, the issue with distros is probably that they are too similar, not too different. Since they are similar, everybody seems to think that if you respect Suse's guidelines the result will work on Red Hat. Conversely, since Windows and OSX are sufficiently different, no-one makes this mistake when developing for these two platform. The proof is that the mistake was made between Win95 and XP, at times with funny results. Reality is that distros provide guidelines that should be treated like APIs. When opening a file in posix, you would not pass the file path as the second parameter of 'open', because posix tells you it is the first. So, why when you develop for debian you fill it right to put config files in /var/www if debian policy tells you they should go in /etc? When you code, you do not call your function printf, because there is a printf already. So why when developing for debian, you make a package with the same name as a package that is already in debian but with a different 'semantic'? The real issue is that distro's guidelines are not strictly enforced. If they were, there would be no problem. And this is the reason why there are no issues with IOS. Either you respect the guidelines or your package cannot go in the store and be installed. Stop.

Here, the problem is that owncloud pretends to be building packages for debian, but in fact it does not respect the debian "contract" (APIs and guidelines). The real problem is that the result sorts of work, so it seems good enough. Until it fails bringing your data with it.

One more thing, for something important that I had forgotten before. Compliments to all the owncloud developers for the release and for the new great features!