BILL HUMPHREY wrote: > > Umbuto, Debian, Badin, Palin ... I'm confused. >
In case it wasn't a joke, and in case it interests anyone who is genuinely not familiar. Its a different world. Because all the source code for Linux and almost all the applications is available freely to anyone, and because anyone can take and borrow anything from any existing Linux distribution, anyone can produce their own Linux distribution, and many do. If you look on Distrowatch, there are over 300. They are all packagings of subsets of basically the same basic stuff. However, there is an awful lot of stuff. Debian for instance has upwards of 20,000 applications in its repositories. So if you are putting together a distribution for, say, scientific use, you will include a different subset from if you are putting one to be used for security network auditing purposes, or graphics, or game playing. The general purpose ones all have very similar stuff, Open Office, KDE or Gnome or Xfce and so on. But the smaller ones each have their own different choices and optimizations. This does make the task of releasing something like Rev that works equally well on all distributions and desktops a bit of a challenge, but it is very much an exception in the Linux world when one doesn't Linux users rapidly become aware when they give these sorts of explanations to sophisticated people who just don't happen to have used it, and haven't used it as a sole system, that it produces a common reaction of impatient disbelief. This simply cannot work. It cannot possibly work to have a choice of 4 or 5 login managers, which can each be combined with any of 6 or 8 Window Managers, which can each then be combined with each of half a dozen desktop environments, all of which can be used with any of a dozen or so terminals and file managers and editors and development environments and toolkits...! Yes, but it does work, its just a different model. Just like a choice between a few hundred different wineries can work. Similarly, we are often wedded to the view that the look and feel of the desktop characterizes the OS. You find this in discussions of Aqua, or Vista versus XP. So it is very difficult to explain to people that Linux has no standard desktop manager, it has a choice of 10-20, and within that, each desktop manager has multiple themes, icon shapes, and is also configurable in terms of menu placement, items, single click versus double click, menus that work like Apple's or like Windows',...and so on. Similarly with uniformity of look and feel across applications. It doesn't exist, isn't expected or even noticed for the most part. A very common reaction to all this is to feel that if only Linux (whatever that is!) would standardize, it would do so much better. But, for better or worse, its not that kind of beast. If only mongrels all were about the same height and weight and shape, we could exhibit them better in dog shows. Yes, guess so. But you have to think where mongrels came from in the first place, and what is this stuff about dog shows anyway? Well, hope this is helpful to someone! -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/RR-in-Wine-tp19763770p19800365.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
