Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Here are a couple links, the first being the redoubtable Caitlyn Martin, the
second Warren Woodford. These guys are serious people and should be
listened to:
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/ubuntu-is-a-poor-standard-bear.html
The other is the case she does not mention, that of Warren Woodford of
Mepis who moved away a couple of years back
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html
It makes no sense to 'standardize' on a distribution which is made the way
Ubuntu is. By all means use it if that is what one likes. I have nothing
against that. But this is not about what we like, its about what we use for
standardization, and the whole concept of standardizing on something which
is built new every six months out of someone else's experimental packages
makes no sense.
Both authors make some good points, but even Ms. Martin notes:
To whatever part of the general non-geek public is even aware of
Linux the names "Linux" and "Ubuntu" are all but interchangeable.
Markets are funny things.
Betamax was arguably a much better standard than VHS, and Mac arguably
better than Windows. We saw how those worked out.
And so it is with Ubunutu: While its historical development paths may
raise some questions, the bottom line is that Ubuntu, warts and all, is
the leading distro today.
I didn't choose Ubuntu; the market chose it for me.
I used to use Red Hat when I was starting out, then switched to SUSE for
a while. I liked both of them well enough, but I simply don't have
enough PCs lying around to install every major distro out there so I
decided to adopt the one most folks were using.
For a long time that was difficult to determine and often in flux, but
in recent years Ubuntu has emerged as dominant on the desktop, and not
without reason: By focusing on the end-user experience, they've made an
OS that just about anyone can use without a manual. That's a BIG leap
forward in a community that had historically earned for itself a
reputation of appealing only to geeks.
It's not my job to tell my customers which OS they should be using. My
job is simply to deliver software products for the OS they already have.
I don't personally care which distro any individual chooses, or whether
they choose Mac, or Windows, or anything else. Diversity is good, it
keeps competition healthy and maintains an efficient gene pool.
But for my products and those of my clients, we've focused on Ubuntu as
our primary Linux target because that's where most of our customers are.
To the degree that they may favor a single distro in RunRev's offices, I
suspect their thinking is similar. It simply isn't their choice to
make, it's the market's.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
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