Yet Another Call for Linux Standardization

An anonymous reader writes "Newsforge has an article Commentary: United We Stand...the Division in the Linux World, in which David Meyer argues that UnitedLinux will provide standardization for the Linux community that will allow it to win the desktop market from Windows. The article has a number of supporting comments, but then this one particular negative comment that disagrees with David. This particular comment offers an alternative view on the need for standardization. This aternative view that is put forward simply argues that 'Over what is almost twelve years we have pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps. We have done this using a development model that allows us to produce software that proprietary vendors cannot compete with', and then summarizing that 'the Linux community does not need to set up businesses with the specific intention of trying to "win" users from Microsoft; all we have to do is continue to develop software in the same way, and the users will make the switch all by themselves'."

Comments

standardization is a problem

[Billly Gates]

I never really knew how serious is it was untill I wanted to become a unix expert. I began with gentoo due to the great amount of documentation. I had great luck with it untill 1.4 when devfs just became to unbearable and buggy to deal with. For some dumb reason I could not get /boot to mount properly. No its not a devfs thing and I know how to disable it on startup but this problem only exists in 1.4 and the mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /boot does not work.

Anyway I decided to try out suse and debian. Boy, what a difference. Every single file was in the wrong place on both systems. Suse was truly awefull in yast overiding any changes to my system files. I am aware of the .config files yast uses can be edited manually but I want to be a unix expert and not a suse expert.

Redhat tries to have psuedo files /etc that are symlinked elsewhere.

I understand *Bsd users perfectly in regards to defragmentation and quality problems in linux. In regards to quality and I refering to cutting edgeness and bugginess compared to other unix's including bsd. I am not saying its unstable.

I like how *bsd simplier and everything system related is configured from /etc like it should. The FreeBSD manually is a great resource and probably one of the greatest unix books around. Gentoo is the only distro that I know of that comes close to this. I love manually editing the /etc/make.conf file to optimize my whole system. Slackware from what I heard uses bsd style init and maybe more simplistic but I have not tried it so I am not qualified to make an opinion.

I got tired of hacking my systems for weeks on end trying to customize it so I switched back to Windows2k. (shudder) I am waiting for freebsd 5.0 to come out and will likely use it when its ready. The early 5.0 dp-2 release does not like my usb hardware for some reason and still needs some work in regards to threading, java and nvidia opengl driver support.