re: Another serious blow delivered to the validity of EULAs
Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 11:15 am
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3925 messages posted)
Steve wrote:
|I would love to see the Linux guys consolidate the distros into a couple of flavors.
|
Reminds me of Apple's "1984" commercial.
The fact is that diversity in an ecosystem is a Good Thing(tm);
it spurs innovation and minimizes the bad stuff associated with monocultures.
The most obvious divide in the Linux world is .RPM vs .DEB
(RedHat's package management system vs Debian's).
The slight differences in directory structures is another point folks grouse about.
There is, however, an app called alien that allows you to
install apps built for one packaging system into a non-native environment
so neither of these points has been a serious issue for years.
(The only analog of alien I can think of in the Windoze world is KernelEx
--and that's not even close to the same thing.)
There's also LSB
which is meant to address what you have indicated. It has seen mixed success.
There's also a distro that has a more Windoze-like directory structure:
cache
of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux#Overview
Linux is about CHOICE.
Obviously, some people are more comfortable with that than others.
|Think Linux will have a hard time catching on with so many versions.
|
People do more radical things than that daily
--like switching back & forth between Windoze and Mac--
so yours is the usual argument that is easily blunted with empirical evidence
e.g. folks moving between distros at work
to accomplish different tasks on different workstations.
When you look at all the little gizmos that Windoze users install on their boxes
to make their lives easier, then compare box-to-box, you'll see lots of variation;
I don't see that as significantly different from *n?x boxes.
Actually, the fact that you can get
a Linux distro that is pre-tweaked to someone's preferences
(and you can seek out a distro whose defaults are similar to your own prefs)
AND that you can test drive that setup *before* installing it
make that ecosystem quite powerful--in truth, more friendly than any other.
Here's a spin of Fedora that is an amazing example
and presents a strong rebuttal to your points:
cache
of http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/download.html
Mythbuntu, which competes with Windows Media Center, is another fine example.
Android, which competes with Windows Mobile is yet another.
|Each version I tried had a big learning curve unique to the version.
|
When Mac and Linux users are dropped into a Windoze ecosystem,
you generally hear the same thing--often louder.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple; everything else is learned."
Mostly, your resolve is determined by your commitment to Freedom.
My points about South Korea show the other side of the coin
(slavery where you pay a premium for your own chains).
|The average Clueless Windows User
|can go from Windows 95 straight to Windows 7 and get along fine.
|
I keep hearing that--but then I see the Windoze forums full of questions.
...and one of the more telling items I've seen lately:
from the Usenet Archive: Most Popular Apps by Platform
The developer apps in the bottom list reinforce my point
about Asians using Free Software to dominate that field in the coming years.
...and since Nokia bought TrollTech and freed-up the license on that widget set
(Qt), it's become
simpler than ever to write cross-platform apps
--very much the write once, run anywhere ideal we've been waiting for.
|
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 | | | |  | re: Another serious blow delivered to the validity of EULAs (gewg_: Thu, Oct 8, 2009, 11:15 am) |
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