KDE OS: Why not

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Thursday 04 January 2007 15:30, Marvin Raaijmakers wrote:
> Buh buh buh buhuhuhuh

Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. I can only assume you 
wanted to ridicule Marco? But I may be wrong....

Marco has a very valid point, especially when hinting at the "number 
of different Linux flavours and the binary incompatibility from one 
to another (and from one release to the next one)"

*You* may not understand that point, because you are looking at it
from a user's point of view; a user who has found his personal Linux
happiness in one specific distro that does not have much of an issue
with the point (because it has a fairly well working "apt-get dist-
upgrade" mechanism).

However, for quite some users and many of their use cases this *is* 
a major problem.

But you may start to understand if you put yourself for a moment out
of your 'user' shoes, and slip into the ones of an independent soft-
ware vendor (ISV) -- even a non-FOSS one! -- and consider that you'll
have to build packages for each and every distro and their releases.
And test them. And test their upgrade paths. And fix bugs for each
one. And upload them to your web page. And possibly burn the CDs. 
And label these. Etc., etc., pp., ...

More and more people come to realize that this is a problem that 
needs to be tackled. Hence the recent LSB face to face meeting in
Berlin that discussed "packaging" (December 6 2006, according to 
http://www.freestandards.org/en/LSB_face-to-face_%28December_2006%29 )

For a good intro into the general problem, please have a look at 

   http://klik.atekon.de/presentation/

(even if you may not agree with the proposed solution "klik" ...)

Or see here:

   http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1063

Or here:

   http://ianmurdock.com/?p=388
   http://ianmurdock.com/?p=391

As you can now probaly see, Marco has a very valid point, and he is 
not the first one to express it...

However, I do not agree with his proposed solution: Adding the one
thousand and first Linux distro to the existing 1000 ones will not
magically overcome the problem at hand: the sheer "number of 
different Linux flavours and the binary incompatibility from one 
to another (and from one release to the next one)"   :-)

Now if there were any chance to make this 1001st distro gain a 20%,
40%, 70% market share amongst all Linux distros within 1, 2, 3 years
I may re-consider this statement...

Until that time, I'll throw may little mind's weigh behind the 
efforts of LSB, and KDE and klik.

Cheers,
Kurt