One great distro?

[jan1024188]

Hello guys,

Well, I have a question bothering me. Why the hell are there hundreds of stupid distros.
Nowdays people just change the background image and name and they "release" new and "own" linux.

Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, all are same just few differences. All are having own bugs, and I find out very annoying that some things work on fedora and not ubuntu, and some on ubuntu but not fedora.

Why the hell don't developers merge all distros into one big distro having much less bugs, crushes etc. etc.?

Jan

[Mel Thompson]

You are right that there does seem to be lots of useless duplication. However, a lot of us eternal newbies out here are still not very good at a lot of install routines, (plus, even people who are good at them finally collapse in frustration). So what that means is that mostly us former Mac guys are stuck with whatever programs that come pre-packaged and pre-installed with the original distro. And there I find some serious differences.

For instance, the odd desktop publishing software Scribus is hard for even seasoned folks to install. But, astoundingly, it comes pre-packaged on the CentOS Live CD, and, so far, nowhere else. Then there are those of us who like Ice Weasel and Sea Monkey. Ubuntuzilla's great efforts notwithstanding, still most users thrash about trying to get them onto their distros. Debian comes with Ice Weasel. KDE distros come with K Konqueror browser, which is unique in the way that it surfs for files internally and externally. And then you have odd folks like me who enjoy an XFCE windows manager, from time to time. (Hence, Xubuntu, and for K-oriented folks Kubuntu.)

So, I think that until Linux installer programs get anywhere, (and sadly, on any given day, RPMs, YUMs and Apt-Gets may or may not work at all on much of anything), people like me will gather stacks of distros to suit our moods. I've been fiddling with Linux distros now for years, and am even taking line-command mini-courses on line, and so on, and still, most anything one tries to do outside of the initial package of software, mostly fails, (except for those kernel-compiling guys who, God bless them, live in another world).

If distros can ever find a really real installer program that actually, honestly works for "total zombies," then pre-packaged is what it's all about. (Remember too, in the pre-packaging realm, that various distros have rules about varying levels of proprietary-ism. Some distros are outrightly hostile to attempts to install semi-free, but not totally-free, software into them, requiring the poor newbie souls to gather varying other packages from around the world to build a whole environment suitable to even begin the probably-failed install attempt of a new/alien program into this or that distro.

If computer storage and disk storage and Linux all advance, one could forsee a time when one could install a mega-distro with a toggle button that allows one to zip back and forth between window-management systems, and an installer button that just handles it, in terms of plug-ins and software external to the current package. In short, a cultural resistance still exists to just letting "total computer losers" just simply have what they want, and hence the chaos of distos who are more open, and less open, to just handing the goodies over to a bunch of "zeroes" who won't "compile a kernel" or "resolve package dependencies," as though dudes wanting a desktop publishing program ever gave a #### about "resolving package dependencies."

I remain,

Mel C. Thompson, Eternal Newbie.

[elija]

Well, the distro that is right for me may not be the distro that is
right for you. And anyway one "mega" distro would put us in the
Windows world of monopolies.

Besides the Open Source ideal is choice.

I know what you mean though, when I first started looking at Linux,
I too suffered the Windows users fear of the sheer amount of
choice available to me. It was all so alien.

Now I love it.

[MikeTbob]

Why the hell don't developers merge all distros into one big distro having much less bugs, crushes etc. etc.?

Jan

That's like saying, "Let get rid of all the cookies, except oatmeal cookies." I don't know about you, but I like having hundreds of cookies to choose from.

[daark.child]

Hello guys,

Well, I have a question bothering me. Why the hell are there hundreds of stupid distros.
Nowdays people just change the background image and name and they "release" new and "own" linux.

Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, all are same just few differences. All are having own bugs, and I find out very annoying that some things work on fedora and not ubuntu, and some on ubuntu but not fedora.

Why the hell don't developers merge all distros into one big distro having much less bugs, crushes etc. etc.?

Jan

The idea of one big distro is never going to happen. Distros may look the same but underneath the hood there are many differences that would make one individual prefer one over the other. Its not a new thing because right from the beginning there were several different versions of Linux e.g. Red Hat, SLS, Yggdrasil etc and these went on to spawn other distros e.g. Mandriva, Slackware etc. This is the gift and the curse of opensource i.e. a developer can legitimately repackage or fork a distro which has resulted in a multitude of distros. Some of those forks sometimes end up being very successful and others are just a waste of time.

[Gtrax]

I use different distros for different things. The biggest splashiest ones we know all offer a desktop with office-type suites (plural!) , internet browsers (plural!), multimedia packages and ways of installing (free) software from a list that beggars belief!

Consider, when the need is for a small rock-solid embedded Linux running a PC104 type card to control a satellite earthstation, via internet link, no screen keyboard, mouse or graphics adaptor... Well.. it can be done from a Windows distro, I suppose, but I did not even bother to try.

Sure, there are more than 250 "distros" out there. You are so right that some should have been strangled at birth, and if you search Techiemoe's rants, you will find one loathsome thing he rated (0) that gratuitously injures the whole Linux effort. Even so, if you want a hardened secure web server you intend to use to effect bank payments, you don't choose a distro devoted to video media production. If you are intent on hanging together a kick-ass Bewulf Cluster for serious University parallel computing, maybe the latest DSL (Damn Small Linux) is not the best place to start (though now that I think about it, I am unsure!)

I do think that, however different the distros are, working toward a agreed universal installation standard, with one download format, would be a big boost. Its great that we can use and contribute to open source software, and the download tools have greatly eased "dependency hell", but we still have "incompatibility hell" and "repository hell". I would love it if any downloaded Linux software could be assured to run on any distro without us having to get it compatible by compiling from source.

[oz]

We already have the one distribution that's perfect for everyone, or at least Microsoft tells us it is.

I prefer to keep my options open.