Why Having 500+ Distros is a Good Thing

Caitlyn (and me) were griping about pointless, stupid differences, like putting files in different places for no good reason, re-branding and distributing an existing distribution without any meaningful differences other than the name and artwork, and continually starting new projects, when supporting existing ones would make more progress. The FOSS world is 90% half-baked stuff, and not enough mature, polished software. Documentation is getting worse instead of better. It's easy to start something in a rush of enthusiasm, then get bored and move on to something else. That's not software development, that's self-indulgence.

TC,

I kind of agree with your initial comments, but, I think the diversity and resulting chaos is an unfortunate but necessary result of open source/FOSS. Just chalk it up to human nature, but, we'll have to live with it.

I think if we opened up _development_ more in the larger distros the smaller ones wouldn't have to do things in weird ways.

There would have to be some kind of software that would facilitate it and it would be huge...of course, I'm only speculating.

I truly think that having these many distros is innovative and nice for the thousands of devs out there...without having this many choices, many of them might just say 'forget about it' and program in M$ or something.

I'd say one big exception to this is something I see done with Morphix and PC Linux OS.

Both of these distros have features that let you easily produce specialized live cd's.

Brian Ketelson has used this to make a most excellent Rails Live CD: http://www.railslivecd.org/

Its based on pc linux OS and lets you try out the Ruby on Rails development environment for the cost of a CD and a download.

There are other specialized live cd's for system recovery, multimedia, firewall, and other things. These 'distros' are not trying to be the next Red Hat or slackware. They are just trying to meet a few specialized needs. They let the parent distro handle the core and just add the specialized features for their audience.

I think that the live cd game distros should fall in this categorie too.

They don't really add anything to the parent distro, but they do scratch an itch.

I think that some of these distros are simply experiments - either people trying to learn or just efforts at innovation. That some fail or flounder or just never quite "get there" may be an unfortunate side effect, but surely people are learning all kinds of things, including what it takes to maintain a software project. :-)

> people are learning all kinds of things, including what it takes to maintain a software project. :-)

Absolutely, and that's the up side. Many of those people will be using those learned skills in future projects that will make a difference.

CHADDB actually falls into this category. I've learned I really don't have a heart for hacking code. But I have also learned that I kind of enjoy designing databases. And I also like playing with database servers to some extent. Who knows, maybe one day I'll actually do something fairly interesting with CHADDB.

> enjoy designing databases

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I struggle with coding, but I really enjoy doing databases.... Go figure...

My soon-to-be 14 year old daughter made a fairly accurate analogy of just this topic a couple of weeks ago at the dinner table. Wise beyond her years, and that being a constant source of concern for her daddy, she simplified the matter down to a level the "Reality TV" generaration can easily understand.

At the dinner table with her "weekend-visiting" cousin seated across from her, she was axed by said cousin why Linux had so many distributions. Linux is often the source of conversation at my dinner table...go figure. Amanda summed it up nicely.

"It's just like American Idol. Some of them suck, some of them rock. The people that use them are the voters."

I still smile when I think about that moment. One of the most complex issues this community faces, boiled down to two sentences.

Kid...ya gotta love 'em

h

Quoting:Kid...ya gotta love 'em

I bet she takes after her mother. lol