having one Linux OS would truely be the answer, but then 10 years down the road I bet that people would start to lump Linux and Microsoft into the the same club and then start a brand new OS altogether!
I guess we'll always have to have an OS that highly diverse, yet is confusing to the majority of people and therefore a company such as Microsoft (or AOL if talking about internet) with always step in to make things a little bit easier for the average Joe.
I knew when I was looking into these comments that it would be a hotbed of Linux support.
I understand and recognize the point of the statement. There are lots and lots of flavors of open-source available and I would hazard a guess that a couple posters have created some of their own already. If your response is anything like "well I can reaarange the operating system code in open source" then of course you're biased, because the majority of people can't recode an OS.
Microsoft has a fairly straight-forward model: major release + patches. I suppose thats the same thing with OSS, but when OSS has a 5.3.2.7.4.8 release, I'll be damned if they didn't tag on the last couple of numbers just for kicks sometimes.
So I'll be the one to say it then, yes having 50 different versions of an OS (i.e. Linux) with a myriad of user created/customized apps is a lot more confusing than to just buy the most recent box on the shelf and then patch it to the latest level by clicking on a button.
An earlier poster described it best, that we should think in terms of Microsoft being a single distro. if all I every looked at was a single distro of Linux (say Suse) then things would be a lot easier from an OS standpoint to follow.
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I guess we'll always have to have an OS that highly diverse, yet is confusing to the majority of people and therefore a company such as Microsoft (or AOL if talking about internet) with always step in to make things a little bit easier for the average Joe.
I understand and recognize the point of the statement. There are lots and lots of flavors of open-source available and I would hazard a guess that a couple posters have created some of their own already. If your response is anything like "well I can reaarange the operating system code in open source" then of course you're biased, because the majority of people can't recode an OS.
Microsoft has a fairly straight-forward model: major release + patches. I suppose thats the same thing with OSS, but when OSS has a 5.3.2.7.4.8 release, I'll be damned if they didn't tag on the last couple of numbers just for kicks sometimes.
So I'll be the one to say it then, yes having 50 different versions of an OS (i.e. Linux) with a myriad of user created/customized apps is a lot more confusing than to just buy the most recent box on the shelf and then patch it to the latest level by clicking on a button.
An earlier poster described it best, that we should think in terms of Microsoft being a single distro. if all I every looked at was a single distro of Linux (say Suse) then things would be a lot easier from an OS standpoint to follow.