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.

Comments

Use KDE for Userlinux please.

[Mr Haxalot]

There are serious problems with Gnome at the moment, and I will explain them here with the Gnome-translate-o-matic.

Ever since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide to some of their claims, and what they really mean.

Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with your source code.

Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines.

Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of settings.

Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS.

Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx, netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light!

Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.

Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files

Gnome allows mac like operation.
x86 compatible 1 button mice are almost impossible to find, and it dosen't copy the whole macbar concept. Not to even mention their auto apply implementation is broken and dangerous! Plus if they did actually come anywhere close to copying the Mac the C&D letters would come flying up their asses.

Gnome is GNU software.
gnu/Yay, gnu/gnome gnu/for gnu/my gnu/debian gnu/linux gnu/500mhz /gnu/celeron gnu/packard gnu/bell gnu/box.

Inspired by the gentoo translate-o-matic.

Perens Gives A Weak Argument

[zeasier]

Or least that's how the article portrayed him. If commercial Linux should unite under a free foundation it should be Fedora. Red Hat is already used commercially in many areas and is the closest to a standard in that market. Or at least that is what I have heard, no hard facts here. It doesn't matter if Fedora is less free than Debian. Right now the market trend seems to be with Red Hat. It's a failing argument that Debian should adopted based it's openness. The market shall decide. It's much easier to compromise and use Fedora as a standard.

Perens shouldn't be wasting his breath advocating commercial Debian in such a general way. If he really wants to increase Debian's commercial use then it needs to be adopted by a successful company and proven in it's business model. To accomplish this he needs to make deals with establishment and convince them to support Debian. General propaganda is of limited use in this case.

Who he is really speaking to is the naive entrepreneur. He's hoping some fool will buy the ideology and build successful enterprise with Debian. Not to say it's a bad idea, but such an endeavor is a bit risky.

Re:That would work...

[pmz]

I really don't care about choice.

If you are a US citizen, you should be ashamed.

Re:Why does nobody get this?

[dildatron]

I can understand you wanting Quicken and Photoshop, but there are better alternatives our there for Thumbs Plus. For free.