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United Linux: Two Years Later
ajs writes "In November 2002 everyone who wasn't Red Hat was gathering behind a banner that many thought would spell the beginning of a new chapter in the Unix Wars. That banner was called United Linux. Much has changed in the Linux world since then, and some Founding Partners in the United Linux camp have decided that there are other ways to change the market. Thankfully there are more level headed members of that group. Today, we're not so focused on the differences between Linux distributions, Sun's rants, the aforementioned lawsuits and ever-present, market-gobbling Microsoft keep everyone focused and united enough as it is, and United Linux has begun to fade into memory. So what has United Linux done? Well, it unified three distributions at least, focused attention on Linux standards and made hardware vendors feel a bit less lost when writing drivers for Linux, so it wasn't all a loss. Alas, according the the United Linux site, "There are no plans for a version 2.0 at this time.""
If you look at UL's website, they SCO is still members of united linux . how ironic
http://www.unitedlinux.com/en/partners/index.html
Stop signs are only Suggestions
I'm now hoping Linux Standard Base 2.0 will really take off.
Omnis amans amens
Now this isn't the only reason but the thing that bothers me most about Linux is updating software. Debian looks like it would be easy to update but I wouldn't know becuase I can never get X to work correctly.
The main reason why I don't use Linux on my desktop is GAMES. I'm sure people complain about this all the time. If the game developers would just design games to run on most systems I would be using Linux right now but instead I'm stuck using this piece of shit Windows.
If Linux distro Could get a macosx type Application installer (aka drag and drop the application anywhere into the harddrive) it would gain support like you wouldnt believe, RPM, deb, ebuilds, tar.bz2, tar.gz, all are to complicated for the normal user. Yes I know rpm -ivh blah.rpm isnt hard and apt-get install gaim isnt hard, but I think Staticly compiled binaries are the way to go!
keanmarine.com
The competing versions of Linux are worse than the browser competition. Microsoft has made sure that HTML, and now XML, are proprietary depending on how you choose to implement them. The divisions are killing the effort. Is this the future of Linux? Or is this the fate of open source?
I used to believe that linux was harder to set up than windows too, then I installed XP and SuSe 9.1 Pro on my laptop in the same weekend.
At the end of the weekend I had a fully configured Linux system with all the apps and server components that I wanted. My windows install was already crashing because there aren't WHQL certified drivers available for some of the components in my laptop.
I was still trawling the web looking for applications to meet my needs on monday morning.
It certainly didn't seem to me like windows was easier to install.
You are right, but that doesn't make RH completly like UL.
I didn't put it in my post but the original idea behind UL was to make a strong RH competitor. In that perspective debian comes closer....
One of the bad things about companies choosing RH exclusivly is that they asume RH==Linux and anybody who dares to put its files a little different or use a different library version is in for a surprise.
(When are big software vendors going to learn not to link to a specific sub-sub-version of a library instead of just a major version?)
If there were two big guys (RH & UL or RH & debian) vendors would be forced to take possible differences in account. The result will be better and more flexible software.
Jeroen
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I've always thought the "problem" with Linux is that it is a democracy.
:-) ) couldn't give a **** what desktop they use as long as it works. ...and what happens if a distribution decides to just supply KDE or Gnome (but not both) ? We have a flame war !!! There is so much in-fighting in Linux that I fear that it may never be accepted as a real alternative.
While on one hand this allows anyone to make any bit of code and bolt it on to Linux, it has the very serious adverse affect of generating "non-standards".
I think the BSD projects are much better in this respect (Theo of OpenBSD has actually stated "it is not a democracy"). While the odd use might complain of lack of choice etc (not me, I might add), I think most users really appreciate the fact that you can pick up a bit of code and if it is documented as working on *BSD then you can be pretty sure that it will.
I accept, of course, that there are differences between the BSDs out there so it's not all rosy.
When it comes to Linux though, I think the problem has got completely out of hand. You have the KDE vs Gnome ware. Ok, this is not specific to Linux, but I think its affect it much more strongly felt in the Linux community. Most end users (and I'm talking about Jo / Jane Bloggs here, not us geeks that read Slashdot
Personally, I think the world should move to one of the BSDs (OpenBSD is my choice) - they simply do not suffer this in-fighting to anywhere near the same extent as Linux does. But that's another issue altogether.
In the meantime, I think the Linux needs someone (elected by all the distributions) who can steer this whole mess into some cohesive system so that when we say "Linux" we actually know what we are talking about and we don't have to worry about exactly WHICH Linux we are talking about. Until this happens (and I don't think it actually will !), Linux will always have an acceptance problem.
Yeah, Windows 2 was AWESOME !!
Well, I hate to admit this, but it was... Windows 2/386 was pretty good at preemptive multi-tasking (I remember being amazed at watching my DOS Fortran code run in several dos shell windows at the same time).
OK, so it wasn't UNIX, and it looked ugly, but this was neat.
Also, for someone who had been dealing with a variety of awful print driver systems and graphics libraries, Windows 2 provided just one awful print driver and graphics library - this was actually a time-saver.
as far as server technology goes we all know that most of the backend of the internet is served to us on some POSIX (linux, unix, sun etc...) unit or cluster. So we know that the community has won that war. The things that Linux needs to do to win the DESKTOP war is this: 1. easy install features (automated installers) RPM's are close, but dependencies can be a nightmare. 2. games. you are all going to bitch about this one I know, but the reality is that the game industry has now SURPASSED the movie industry in profitability... now tell me games are not important to desktop applications. Look at how much business TransGaming does just simply by retuning Wine to run games...
I forgot that not all the world is a x86...
BTW, it won't run even on FreeBSD/x86 if you disable the Linux binary layer.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog