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Perens: Unite behind Debian, UserLinux
An anonymous readers writes "Infoworld is running a report on the Desktop Linux Conference, at which Bruce Perens suggested that in order to get Linux to the enterprise desktop, the Linux community should base their efforts on one single distribution... based on Debian.
Perens went on to say that enterprises will be willing to pay Linux companies to engineer versions of Linux to suit their needs, but that the base distro should remain free. He suggested that by 2006, 30% of enterprise desktops will run Linux." Here is a wired story with more information about his proposed UserLinux project.
Because few people want/need to build their own system. Debian has shown an incredible ability to package stable and consistent software which has already become the basis for many different desktop distributions (Corel/Xandros, Lindows, Knoppix). Also Debian supports more architectures than any other Linux Distribution (correct?) and hence all the work done by the various parties would help to ensure that the computer market is held in balance in terms of architectures (i.e. if every Linux distro used Debian as a base, and Linux gained 30% of the desktops, then the ability for "the market" to switch architectures in the event of gross arrogance (i.e. AMD and Intel push through DRM technologies which require annual licensing) would be vastly improved compared to if the Linux distros in use were all derived from RedHat). Of course ideally Gentoo would also collaborate in this enterprise and would become debian derived (i.e. you could do a debian base install and then do "apt-get install gentoo-stageN" to have it use debian as the toolchain to build gentoo, perhaps even building the system out of debian source packages (with gentoo patches)).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Nobody is asking her to install Linux.
Just to run it.
You can boot from a Live CD, play with Linux, then reboot, take the CD out, and resume your regularly scheduled programming under Windows.
This is the beautiful thing about Live CD's. If it's done right, the user is completely insulated from all the usual crap we have to do to make Linux work, and without assuming any risk whatsoever from the experience.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I see all these people saying "what is so great about Linux is all these different distro's to try, and Debian is only one".
I don't think you have used Debian. I love Debian because I can put the bare minimum on my machines and then build up from there whether it be Gnome or KDE or a strict web server box with no GUI. To build it up all I have to do is grab the packages I want with apt. I can roll my own distro in a way.
Not to mention Stable, Testing and Unstable are really all different distributions anyway.