Roger Crichlow:
I don't expect the distro wars to ever settle.
What I'd call progress is the degree to which developers of individual
programs streamline their programs based on input from various
distribution builders. To the extent that doesn't happen (large
unintegrated patches or growing complexity in individual programs just
for the sake of different distributions), I don't think it helps to have
lots of distributions. It probably helps to have the authors of
significant programs also employed by some of these distribution
builders and reduce the arbitrary abstraction points which naive
packagers will not cross. That's an advantage Microsoft and Apple and
the large Linux vendors have. To my mind, developers are like players
and packagers are like agents (or cheerleaders).
I have more Linux distributions around than ever. It's easy with
ever-increasing RAM, disk space and virtualization. Current desktop
is Leopard in one monitor and full-screen 64 bit Windows 7 in the other
(via VMWare). Various VMWare windows around with the different Linux
distributions.. No joy running Windows 7 in VirtualBox, by the way.
Marcus
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