KDE OS - Why not?

[Chris]

Am Donnerstag 04 Januar 2007 21:20 schrieb Marvin Raaijmakers:
> I'm sorry but I really do not undestand how someone could say this. Take
> for example a distribution that uses the apt-get system. Suppose you
> have read an article about the Gimp and think: "I want to have that
> program installed on my system". Then you type 'apt-get install
> gimp' (or: click click click click click) and the Gimp is installed. Do
> you really prefer this over: go to the gimp website, download an
> installer, start the installer, tell the stupid installer where you want
> to have it installed and afterwards reorganize your desktop because it
> contains hundreds of icons?

Looking Marcos following statement, he's possibly refering to something else:
"- the number of different Linux flavours and the binary incompatibility from 
one to another (and from one release to the next one)."

Maybe he's refering to the way you install '3rd party" applications. If 
something is in the distributions own repositories installation should be 
easy enough on every distribution, jsut like you explained. So I think what 
he's looking at is the way you install more current versions of apps or such 
3rd party software that's not available from the distribution directly.

> And also note that closed source software farmers can also create .deb
> files for installing their software.

Reality still is that many commercial vendors or other smaller parties such as 
independant game developers (sometimes even open source ones) don't have the 
ressources to create packages for every distribution in the world or just 
don't care about *your* distribution of choice.
This leaves the user with a website, which has the latest and greatest for MS 
Windows (all of them) as a EXE/ZIP, a DMG for Mac OS X and some source 
archive; for the Linux folks.
I can only assume that this is what Marco is on about, because if you find 
Linux banaries of such software it often ends up to be a RPM, specifically 
for let's say Fedora Core 4. 

So don't get me wrong; What Marco suggests isn't the solution to one of those 
problems either, it's just that I agree that from a certain point of view 
there IS a problem with software installation in Linux.
Maybe [2] explains a bit better, that there are others who feel that way.




Unfortunatley yet-another-distribution-specific-package-system as is suggested 
with the "KDE OS" endeavour would not be the solution for this. It would only 
work if everybody(!) would suddenly stop using what they have now and would 
rush out to install "KDE OS".

Marco, if you're serious about your plans, have a good look at what is out 
there today. For example there is a fairly mature method for creating binary 
packages called autopackage[1] that is supposed to deliver binary packages 
that are useable throught most of todays distributions. On the other hand the 
LSB plans to improve upon the current situation as well - see [2]. But 
there's only talk about it as of yet .

Today I could only imagine something like this to come close to the vision of 
yours:
Have a base system of one of the most widely accepted distributions around 
(RH, SUSE or Ubuntu). Since your focus is KDE you might want to look at 
Kubuntu. Only install the very most important base applications via the 
native package system (deb in that case) and provide all the other software 
(media players, mail clients, browsers...) via .package files (see 
autopackage[1]) or a similarly portable format. Thus all of the non-core 
applications are installable not only on your distribution but mostly 
everywhere. Then spread the word about autopackage or your own format and 
have many 3rd parties use it... 

Regards,
Chris

[1] www.autopackage.org
[2] http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4586903228.html