Consolidated Effort

[dmarquis]

OK, so I'll be devils advocate.

What you suggest is that the way to bring the best out of the plethora of packages available is to merge all together and have (for instance) one office suite, one media player, one desktop environment, one email reader, one game... etc.

This sounds awfully like centralisation of services in the hands of the government, you know (for instance) one employer, one make of car, one telephone line company, one airline, one food producer, one state, one nation. Actually, this is reminiscent of communism, or at least the goals of the Soviet states during the 50's, 60's and 70's. So the catchline for this would be 'lets put the commune back in "community support"'?

Holy ****. That COMPLETELY misses my point.

The only "standardization" I advocate is file format. That's the medium by which data and ideas are exchanged. And file-formats can be discussed and compromised upon. How you work on them should NOT be dictated. In other works, everyone uses the same roads, same telephone lines, etc. Different cars, different phone providers, etc.

techieMoe nailed the problem: "the plethora of overlapping applications" There are too many options and no complete function-set in any of them, and none of them will be complete until some of the can come together. I don't see it as a black or white answer. It's compromise of greys.

Actually, "my" approach does work...(I'm not talking OS!!) It's applications. Office suites to a lesser extent, but engineering and even programming software. Most people will agree on either C, or C++, html, BASIC, Fortran, one of a fairly small set of tools. Engineering too...solid modelers for instance have a lot of very complete, but very different apps that work on the same file formats. I would like to see THAT in the Linux-based world.

Making the same widget, I think, is not real competition either. Competition is "racing" to bigger and better goals; not reinvent the wheel with slightly paler rubber.

[Weedman]

No, it was not. Check your facts. Linux (the kernel) was designed as a hobby by Linus Torvalds to be a free version of UNIX. MS Windows had nothing to do with it.

http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9721

i read somewhere else that linus complained that minix was not expandable (ie mdoules) so he built his own minix-based kernel which was expandable.

it was something like that, the aboves not word for word.
/weed

[chopin1810]

No, it was not. Check your facts. Linux (the kernel) was designed as a hobby by Linus Torvalds to be a free version of UNIX. MS Windows had nothing to do with it.

Yeah, since Windows was not real competition at the time, it was just another graphical frontend for DOS, the difference being that it was developed by Microsoft.
This whole issue gets very complex. Basically the future of Linux is in the capital-based projects. They have the most incentive and the best developers. By capital based projects, I mean Mandriva, SUSE, RedHat, I guess Linspire and Xandros would qualify too. But basically all I mean by that is projects who rely on cash flow to keep working. And they have money to make preloading deals with OEMs. I'd guess that in three or four years perhaps these distributions will get to the level of XP hardware detection, and I'm guessing that they will also fix the structural problems as well. They have lots of incentive. The future will not be with totally free projects like Arch or any of those other really small distros that never get anywhere. Their developers have no incentive to keep bringing you a great product.

[cayalee]

i really dont think so, linux people are different to other os users, i dont think the future does lie with people like suse and xandros. the distro's just integrate programs together, and give it a bit of sparkle. hardware etc im pretty sure is done at a kernel level, which i dont think suse/xandros/linspre etc are involved in.
the future for converting more users might lie with those guys, but i dont think the future of linux lies with them. that lies with everyone with linux on their system, a good idea and a will to implement it.