KDE OS - Why not?

[Robert Scott]

Hi,

Maintaining a distribution is a massive job. A distribution's task is to make 
sure ~15,000 pieces of software (in Debian's case) work well together and 
don't step on each other's toes.

When you're doing such a massive job it makes no sense to then restrict 
yourself to just KDE. Which is why something like Kubuntu piggy backs on the 
work of Ubuntu and subsequently Debian.


On Thursday 04 January 2007 13:55, marco marinuzzo wrote:
> - I can't install software if I'm not a geek (I'm a geek and I don't like
> to install software on Linux) 
> - Software houses are coding only on compatible platform.
>
> No choice of software, a nightmare to install it.

Installing software is easy. If you use a distribution with a large userbase 
and large package selection, there shouldn't be any problems. You should tell 
the system to install something, and it'll install it. If you're supporting 
something in a professional capacity you'll be wanting to use only 
distro-packaged software anyway because the distributions have already done 
most of your work for you (making sure software plays nicely with the 
system). The only exception is nonfree software and and that's the vendor's 
problem.

> In my opinion the solution is:
>
> KDE OS
>
> 1) with long term releases (2,3 years)
> 2) binary compatibility from one release to the next one

That's not simple I'm afraid. If distributions had to remain binary compatible 
we'd still be using gcc 2.95.

> 3) a drag and drop mac osx style installer

Drag & drop does not necessarily equal good. What MacOS is doing here is 
really something completely different and far less sophisticated than what 
GNU/Linux distributions and BSDs are doing. The concept of dependencies is 
just ignored, which, while on the surface might seem like the best way to get 
rid of 'dependency hell', it means you're not fully making use of this 
wonderful thing called the 'shared object' which allows a lot of things to 
happen.

For instance: On a system with no dependency information, software authors 
will all bundle their own version of popular library libfoo. That's great, 
except when you realise you have 15 copies of libfoo on your system. And then 
there's a security hole discovered in libfoo. And you have to wait for 15 
vendors to update their packages with the new libfoo.

I'm trying not to turn this into a 'Why distributions are great' rant.

What you're essentially saying is that more control over systems should be 
given to software authors and less to distributions. Well, I think this 
argument is defeated if you ask yourself whether you would like Jorg 
Schilling or Hans Reiser being in control of how (some) of your packages are 
installed.

This is why GNU/Linux distributions are _distributions_ whereas MacOS and 
Windows and friends are just 'let the vendors throw the software in there and 
fight it out'.

Is there such a thing as being offtopic on kde-quality?


robert.