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Too Many Linux Distros Make For Open Source Mess
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Jul 19, 2007 02:02 AM
from the 300-flavors dept.
from the 300-flavors dept.
AlexGr writes "Remember the 1980s worries about how the "forking" of Unix could hurt that operating system's chances for adoption? That was nothing compared to the mess we've got today with Linux, where upwards of 300 distributions vie for the attention of computer users seeking an alternative to Windows."
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Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Surely you mean, those of us who failed to see it the first two hundred times. Or so.
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
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Isn't Anyone Concerned? (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't anyone concerned that the forking of our current Time-Space-Continuum Thingy into the Multiverse will lessen the likelyhood of our stream being selected as the Earth Prime? Someone, please, stop all this forking.
Starting right now, everyone, stop making decisions.
O.K., now, don't think about, just stop...o.k. now, wait, no, now...on second thought....NOW.
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, where the hell is the option to respond to the original article?! I can only respond to an existing article now...
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
just because the top guy changes every once in a while, doesn't mean anything in respect to the quality of the guy sitting on top, they've still got to beat out the other plethora of distros.
ps: the reply button is in the floaty box to the left now.
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until that happens, JoeLinux may as well only exist for Joe and his nerd buddies; to complain about having "too many distributions" is (to me) kind of like complaining at having too many McDonalds (or whatever your preferred chain is). They are all similar. They all serve mostly the same food, with mostly the same flavour. So you should only need one or two, right?
(Disclaimer: I checked for the existence of JoeLinux at distrowatch, but the closest match I found was "JoLinux," which is absolutely not the fictitious distribution to which I was referring)
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
I just released JoeLinux - me and my 2 buddies use it, you insensitive clod!
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
As a major contributor to JeauxLinux, I'm concerned that your distro's name will confuse our users.
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can support just three distros (or just one, even) and do the absolute best job out of ten companies selling in your market to Linux customers, you can really clean up on that 2%.
Think about it. How many PCs are there, even just in the US? There are about 300 million people. Conservatively, let's say 100 million PCs, because 100 is a nice number to work with. So you say Linux is 2%. Fine, 2 million PCs. Let's say you go for a 25% distribution (or one that is part of a branch of distros similar enough to share the software easily). That's 500,000 potential users. Now, let's say your software is applicable to a quarter of the users. That's 125,000 systems. Now, let's say you get 20% market share. That's 25,000 copies.
So, yeah, those aren't Microsoft Windows numbers. They're not even Adobe Photoshop numbers. But how many Windows programs do you know of that sell 25,000 copies? Aside from that, if your three or five person company can get $20 25,000 times on one product (or $100, or $5, or $300, depending on what your product does), do you really mind if you're targeting a niche?
I hate to break this to some of you, but nearly universal usership like MS, Pepsi, Coke, Tylenol, McDonald's and Budweiser is not what builds companies. Those were positioned at the right place at the right time by some very bright people who took advantage of markets very slyly, who used network effects to their advantage, and who were quite frankly willing not to perfect their products because they'd rather have volume than drive up their prices and cut back demand.
Nearly noone calls Budweiser their favorite beer. You wanna know an open secret? It's not meant to be your favorite. The tour guides at the Anheuser-Busch brewery tour in St. Louis will tell you that. Brewing the absolute best beer is always expensive. There are too many opinions on what makes the best beer to please everyone that any beer is best. Most of those esoteric flavors and textures that convince one group a beer is best turn off other people. Budweiser wasn't meant to get into those debates. It was meant to be the beer that sold well. It sells well because despite not being the very best, it's very non-confrontational. Anheuser-Busch has done a very good job at making sure that although Budweiser is not #1 on many lists, it's the beer that's safe to buy when you know your guests drink beer.
Pizza Hut isn't the best pizza. Coke isn't the best soda. McDonald's isn't the best burger. Ikea isn't the best furniture. JC Penney doesn't sell the best clothes. What these companies do is to be good enough, cheap enough, and known widely enough that you'd rather play it safe with them than to either go high-end and risk that you've overspent or go low-end and get truly crap products. They trade being the best for being the best value. They do this in consistency, quality, and trust.
I'd trust my local pizza places to have the best pizza in town. If I see another with the same name a few hundred miles away, I might take a shot at trying it. If I just want to know I'm getting pretty good pizza at a pretty good price, I'd probably find a chain like Imo's, Mazzio's, Pizzeria Uno, Gino's or Cassano's. If I'm further from home and none of the regional chains are around, I'd likely fall back to a national chain like Pizza Hut. I also fall back to Pizza Hut sometimes when they run a special or when they have a buffet, so I can get in and out quickly.
Microsoft is the same way. Yes, Microsoft probably has the resources at this point to make the world's best operating system for some person's definition of best. Their goals, though, are market share and profit. They get market share and keep it by being good enough, by serving the most popular needs, by foregoing any co
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)
But regardless, your whole post is moot because you're talking to the wrong person. I'm not the developer. I'm the consumer. And right now, the developers are not offering what I'd like to buy so I'm just trying to postulate why that might be. You can disagree with me all you like, but until the software I want/need is available for Linux, your argument means nothing.
I'm all for supporting the small guy in the niche market (I'll always take the local pizza over Pizza Hut) but when the niche market offers only sushi and I'm looking for hot dogs, then I begrudgingly have to take the hot dogs from the big guys.
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what else do those distributions serve except egocentrical purposes, especially since the majority consists from taking a large well-known distribution and only tweaking it slightly and, tada, Monkey Nutsack Linux is born.
Seriously, for most consumers, assuming Linux is still going after Windows and the desktop, more choice is not necessarily better, especially not when it numbers in the hundreds.
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Interesting)
They fill a need in function.
How many distributions are there once you've discounted the ones that are EXTREMELY FOCUSSED?
Lose the rescue distros. The distros designed to run from a single floppy, the distros designed to have a single function such as firewall-on-a-floppy types.
Once you've edited the list down to lose all those you get down to a reasonable number.
The 300 distros is too much argument is as brain dead now as it was 5 years ago.
A spouting of wintrolls. "Linux has too much choice, how can people know which distro to use when there're so many, blah blah blah". But when more than half of the ones out there are of the type described above, and a third or more of the rest are live cd variations, the actual "desktop linux" and "server linux" focussed distros probably only add up to about 50.
And only 6 of those will be picked by "newbies" anyway.
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fragmentation of Linux distros has nothing to do with it being slowly accepted as a mainstream OS; lack of specialized apps, shaky hardware support and the usual suspects are to blame for that. As well as the fact that for most people Windows and pirated Office Just Work(tm) (which they kinda do, come to think of it) so why change?
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't follow. More is not necessarily better, but neither is it necessarily worse. Nor is less automatically better for that matter.
You mean like Knoppix, which I believe invented the LiveCD, and is still the recovery disc of choice for a great many of us? Or maybe DamnSmallLinux, which packs into 50MB and will run on just about anything? Then there's Smoothwall which vainly flatters the egos of its developers by providing a dedicated, hardened distribution capable of converting an old computer into a firewall router?
That's to name but a few. There are a lot of specialist distros out there supporting a specific activitity, interest or region.
If you're worried about users migrating from windows, then we have enough trouble drawing people's attention to the big names like Ubunbtu and RedHat. I doubt the existence of tomsrtbt or Astrumi are even going to impinge upon their awareness, let alone sow the seeds of confusion
Parent
Feeding the troll... again... (Score:5, Informative)
Us Linux users are not mindless cattle to stampede the shops and get the latest and greatest distro there.
Instead, we are gentlemen of leisure; our systems are updated via network as soon as the new packages hit the server - we have no need to wait for them to be burnt onto CDs, packaged in pretty boxes, delivered to stores and sold at premium price, while we risk our lives in the stampede.
Then again, when you wait for a new version of your OS for five years or more, it is understandable that you want to upgrade immediately; you have tested your patience long enough. We, on the other hand, live upgrading what we choose, when we choose; our patience is never tried, never tested, never gone.
Oh, yes. I nearly forgot. If we really really want the CDs with Linux on them and can't afford to download the ISO, we simply order a bunch from Canonical and have them delivered to our doorstep. And we chuckle when they arrive, for we imagine you standing in line or stampeding the stores to get the bestest and latest, while we sip our drinks and surf the net while our systems upgrade.
Keep your mad rushes. We don't need them, we don't want them.
Parent
Re:Feeding the troll... again... (Score:5, Funny)
I remember when XP came out, our network admin was so full of happiness at being able to upgrade from Windows 2000.
Fox News reported a Class 3 Software Related Stampede forming outside Walmart on the release day, but he just wouldn't listen; he had been counting down the days for months, and had worked extra hours to surprise his wife and kids with copies of their own. It was all he ever talked about.
He wore his favorite shirt and tie to work that day, his shoes shined, his hair combed, a spring in his step.
I'm still haunted by the look of sheer happiness on his face as he left the office during lunch hour to get his copy. The last words he said to me were "I'm off to get my copy! See you later!"
"See you later", he said. "See you later".. I still blame myself..
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Re:Feeding the troll... again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Guess I forgot you could upgrade your Windows installation from 3.x to 9x to XP to Vista through Windows Update.
My bad.
Parent
How many... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One - they are binary compatible. (Score:5, Informative)
People really don't remember their history any more. There wasn't even really source level compatibility from UNIX to UNIX. There were two completely different operating systems (BSD and SystemV) both used as the basis for the different incompatible UNIXes. If you used, for example the "ps" command, the arguments would be different from one to the other. This meant that even shell scripts weren't portable. Claiming that the different Linux distributions are like different UNIXes is crazy when you compare the differences between SunOS4 and SunOS5 (also known as Solaris) which are bigger than the differences between RedHat 6 and Gentoo 2007. Damn youngsters.
Parent
...and it's not really a bad thing (Score:5, Insightful)
So while it may seem a hassle to test on a vast number of platform, it really makes you think about code robustness and quality in a different way. Of course, there is a long way to go in certain areas, not to mention universal third-party package management and desktop integration, but we're slowly getting there, too.
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Mainstream vs Niche (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
maybe with this recent gathering of support behind ubuntu there is the potential for more of a standard-bearer in the linux world, at least in the eyes of those who only use windows/osx.
Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is that the diversity is great. I don't want to see 1000's of distros pushed mainstream per-se, but there is often a reason for the variety. It suits someone anyway.
What I would like to see is more collaboration. Why is Redhat/Fedora building the cludgy system-config* and Suse sticking with YAST while Mandrake (who seems to be losing favor but has committed all their development to the GPL) created DrakeConfig, which actually almost worked.
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Re:Lol... (Score:4, Informative)
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Slashdot Feeds the Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
Forking of software development projects has interesting consequences,sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes neither. Having more than onedistribution... I'm not sure that "forking" is even the right word toapply to that.
Bruce
OMG it has to be STOPPED! (Score:5, Funny)
Do something!
Not so much nowadays (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately, natural selection and evolution of distros made one very popular, which means more packages and less compiling for the general public. This is what Linux needs. The fact there are many other distros for more specific or purist purposes is alright - it doesn't affect Linux' adoption because if you're concerned about popularity you get *Ubuntu.
It wasn't ever true (Score:4, Insightful)
What we have now are maybe 10% distros which pack a _slightly_ different mix of the same tools, or just different default tools, or sometimes just and maybe have a slightly different config tool. Or maybe they'll install one tool in
Either way, from an end-user point of view, whop-de-do, you run the same tools, with the same options and the same interface. That's especially important because for an end-user the OS doesn't even really matter. The computer is just a tool, and the OS is... well, I think Joe Average isn't even sure what the OS is, he just knows he has to have one to run the important part: the apps. What matters is what you can run on that computer. (See the endless "but it doesn't run MS Office" and "but I can't play the latest games on it" arguments.)
Even if one distro skipped a tool you want, you know, there's nothing to stop you to download it yourself.
The Unix fragmentation was a whole different issue. Each of the major vendors actually worked hard to lock their customers in. Unix got fuc^H^H^H forked so hard, it wasn't compatible even at source level any more.
As I always remind people, people want interoperability and open standards when they're the underdog, and they want free access to the top dog's customers. When they're on top, even on a niche, they don't want that any more. Then they want walled gardens and penned captive customers that they can milk and shear regularly. Then they want you to think, "damn, if I get a mainframe to replace these aging Sun servers we have, we'll have to change all this mountain of source code, and for some we don't even have the devs any more and for some, well, we thought we're smart if we get it cheaper without sources... oh well, better buy the next servers from Sun too." And the difference in parameters and effects for the supplied tools, meant you got to retrain all your admins and rewrite your scripts too.
When you're at the top of your own niche, it's all about trade barriers. You want to make it as hard as possible for a competitor to steal your customers. (And unsurprisingly, IBM for example was not only on the receiving end of an antitrust trial long before MS, but also the word FUD was originally used about IBM's practices.)
So, anyway, that's what they did there: each took their own fork of Unix and ran in their own direction with it, as far from everyone else as they could and could afford to. AIX and Solarix, for example, weren't just different distros, they were almost different operating systems. "Portability" was only a buzzword everyone used only in marketing, but tried to keep it to a minimum otherwise. It meant little more than that they all had a C compiler (but even then with subtle "improvements" of their own), and they had to have the same standard C library (but again, each felt free to make their own subtle "improvements" to it.)
What I'm getting at is: in a way the plethora of distros is even a good thing in that aspect. Noone is that secure at the top, or even king of the hill at all. (Not to mention they're all underdogs in the shadow of the 800 pound gorilla called Microsoft.) Noone is in a position to fork their version of Linux and try to lock customers in it.
Lock-in doesn't work when you're the underdog. The same fence that keeps your customers from escaping, also keeps you from reaching everyone else's customers. So noone does it when they have 10% of the market. At that point, you want open standards.
And with the current Linux market structure, we're pretty safe and secure that everyone will want open standards for the next decade straight. Unless MS manages to implode, anyway.
Parent
'Tain't no fork, but a distro (Score:5, Informative)
I know there are exceptions to this rule (iceweasel, icedove) but in general, all distros contribute back to the same pool.
The only issue here is consumer choice, not wasted developer power (unlike real forks). And the Novell fiasco shows the problems
with having a single "one true way" distro - even if it is a community project (in which case its death comes from group
think and dragging its feet on decisions).
A distro, 'taint a fork
300 Linux distributions too many? (Score:5, Funny)
After all...
This. Is. SLASHDOT!I wholeheartedly concur!! (Score:4, Funny)
Its the wrong argument - again... (Score:3, Interesting)
Good point. Also with Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
The car analogy is a good one too. There are now far fewer platforms than there are models, e.g. in Europe VW has the Polo, Golf, A4, A5 and A6 platforms that are used by a wide range of models spread over several brand names (SEAT, Skoda, AUDI, VW). Ubuntu can be seen as using exactly the same approach, with Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Ubuntu as brands but based on a small number of real platform variants. You can argue that the Linux world is actually more visibly attuned to the consumer market, while Windows is more like Communism - the State of Gates decides what the factories will make, and the end users put up with what they are given.
Parent
same old, same old (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I remember. All of us can see now how "forking" hurt Linux's adoption. Not. Besides, wouldn't hurt to try figuring out what the difference between forks and distros are before next time.
Only in the mind of an Open Source HATER! (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the same as suggesting too many different brands of cellular telephone make for a communications mess?
"Oh dear me, there are far too many different cell phones! How do I choose? What do I do? Oh, damn it, I'll just send letters instead."
I think not.
This argument is both ancient and flawed (Score:4, Insightful)
If we ignore the vanity Linuxes (the ones someone did to claim they made one) and the specific-purpose ones (router-on-a-floppy, rescue, media-box) and the opportunistic ones ("let's nail some OEM deal to make some cash" kind) we are left with only a handful of very serious vendors pitching what amounts to be the same product plus some limited bells and whistles, that run on mostly any computer you happen to have, and making money out of supporting it rather than selling you disks (or tapes, if we account for those ancient times) and servers/workstations.
The difference is that I could not run the same binaries on my DG Aviion systems and on my IBM AIX boxes. I can install a Red Hat package on my Ubuntu notebook any time I feel like it (I usually don't)
Ecosystem (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes some Linux distros are a bit pointless, a fair few are redundant and some serve a niche that doesn't exist. But we actually need a large number of distros suited for different environments and in each niche the needs to be some competition to ensure quality.
A small list of niches off the top of my head:
Ideological (Debian)
Source based (Gentoo)
Business Server (RHEL, SUSE Server)
Business Desktop (RedHat, SUSE Desktop)
Home (Ubuntu, Linspire)
LiveCD (Knoppix, Morphix)
Router (LEAF, FREESCO)
Specialist (Musix, GNUstep)
Localised (Red Flag, this is really a whole extra dimension with server/desktop distros etc. needed for each local).
And that doesn't take into accounts preferences like Gnome/KDE, architecture, stable/bleading edge, security/easy of use etc, all of which can effect distro choice in any of the categories above.
300? (Score:5, Funny)
Its a sign that innovation is alive and well (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that important, and who really cares?
It's a lot better than being roped into something you have no
way out of. At least with Open Source, you have options to
do things differently if they're not working.
"Ubuntu, which is clearly the flavor of the month "
Debian has been a favorite for a long time. It may be one
of the oldest distros. Ubuntu is merely icing on top of a
Debian based system. If you remove all the init 5 stuff, you
basically have a command line Debian system ready to be anything
you want it to be. As well as a robust update system and all
the great free stuff that makes linux so great.
Other distros follow this same paradigm. Centos, Fedora, Red Hat.
The underpinnings (since you are in an arcane mood) are the same,
It's the name that changes.
"Ah, so Linux is like a religion."
If you mean Linux is based on on the idea of something that works and
has a large following of people that understand it's advantages,
then yes.
"It is indeed true that the kernel hasn't forked in any significant way"
Other than XFree86, I haven't had any other forks impact me in the least.
And the xorg fork was a necessity. I think forking is good to the extent
that it drives people to come up with new ideas. The duplicating effort
argument I dont agree with. If we hadn't re-invented the wheel at least
once, we'd still be riding on round stones.
"There's no other way to put it: Linux is a forking mess."
And not under the control of a forking monopoly. Just because you find
duplicated effort in many different distros doesn't mean that's automatically
bad. You need to understand that people need to experiment. Distrowatch
is evidence of the experimenting people are doing. You should be glad
these people are putting alternatives out there for you. When you go to
write your column in Vista someday and you DRM key says your running a
pirated version and shuts you out, you'll consider it Linux again.
"So I'll grant readers that, if there's anything amiss with my argument"
Oh, there's plenty amiss. I think you got up on the wrong side of the
bed this morning. Everyone has bad days, it sounds like this is your's.
.... really funny old BBSpot article :-) (Score:4, Funny)
Regards,
John
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Re:.... really funny old BBSpot article :-) (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:300, 1000, it doesn't matter that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
But why would you want to invest a large %age of your time making something that well, is already done reasonably well by somebody else.
What would be nice is if the smaller distros start to take a role of really experimenting and breaking the rules.
OLPC is an example of what I'm talking about. They work from requirements, think outside the box and have come up with something truly amazing, something new.
So those slaving away on their boutique distro that looks like the rest, please, find something better to do, like really innovating. That's the only way to make your distro a break-out success anyway.
It's kind of like US presidential candidates. The field starts out pretty wide but you know early on most of them don't have a chance. The fringe candidates should at least make themselves useful, speak the truth and stir things up.
-- John.
Parent
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
What should he pick? Which is right for him? If they are all Linux then what is the differences? Is one as good as the next?
The problem is not that there is choice, but that there is too much choice. Most average users would rather just fork over the money and get Vista rather than spend hours, days, or even weeks trying to figure out what distribution of Linux to get, then installing it, then learning how to do actually use it.
What you and so many other people forget is that people are willing pay for familiarity and ease of use rather than accept strange, confusing and a learning curve for free.
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