Drowning in Distros
"Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink " Although the state of Linux Desktops.. or for that matter ANY free software, will seldom be akin to Coleridge's drowning man, it may well happen that with hundreds of Distributions to choose from, the right one may be left out.
Today Linux can boast of the maximum number of Distributions compared to any OS. Distributions are basically environments created around the core Linux Kernel. This environment consisting of libraries, utilities and application software is customized by various software vendors and enthusiast groups to make a complete OS.
From websites like Distrowatch and OsDir, you can see how many Distros are currently actively developed. All these, apart from Lord knows how many others which discontinued due to lack of funds or enthusiasm or various other factors, give us an idea of the huge number of options available to the average Joe in choosing an OS.
Heck, just the Ubuntu Distribution based Distros are just way too many to explore.
But when I hear such mind-boggling statistics, two things come in my mind.
Firstly, if there are so many Distros freely available (a LOT of them with Indian contributors), it must be quite interesting to make you own OS. Not to mention it would be fun and I get to have an OS called Raseelix. This thought is the good side -effect if I go and immediately start contributing to the development of one of the Distros. But if I go and make one more OS with nothing new except for some eye-candy... or worse, with a new package manager(lord saves from that).... its gonna be just another brick in the wall.
Secondly, the sheer number of Distros makes it impossible to try out ALL the Distros to see which one suits your need. It's impossible even to READ what each Distro has to offer uniquely.
And this is coming from a Distro-enthusiast. I have been trying out different flavors for quite some time... and more often than not I end up going fanatic over the one which I have installed on my box.
With so much choice, is it possible that we actually end up losing out on the Distro best suited for us ?
We have the same situation, you argue, with softwares. Each vertical has thousands of software with varying features. True!! but usually the best software somehow never get hidden for too long. For example, even though KDE was a one-man project today it is a full fledged project with thousands of contributors the world over. This is not necessarily true for the Distros, which are sizable projects to start with.
Well, ending with a Catch-22 -ish remark, I'll always be glad to have all this choice at my fingertips but I'll also remain eternally unsatisfied that I could never know if there was a better Distro out there for me.
hi!
i would rather say that it is not drowning in distros. As an linux enthusiast even i've tried n number of distros, but finally one needs to settle down with some distro.
ofcourse we can say that there are too many choices, but everyone's choice is also different, not understanding that under the hood everything is the same.
its just the package is different. analyze this it's only a question of some softwares here & there & the way they get installed that is different. once the system is up & running, gnome looks the same as in debian, ubuntu, fedora etc & even the same case with kde.
if u r a command line freak then it doesn't matter to u whether it is kde or gnome.
my suggestion if u really want to find the distro that best suites u, there are two ways, either try it all urself & find out or ask an expert or a person who has tried it all & ask him to suggest a distro according to your usage, it know how or other requirement.
Arun Tomar
Solution Enterprises
www.itvidya.com/spotlight/aruntomar
As an Open Source enthusiast myself, this has been a major concern for me. In the name of freedom the distros have done more harm to the adoption of Linux than they might have offered any choice for the end users. Instead of taking on their real competition on Desktop they have ended up showing one-upmanship amongst themselves. Sad but true.
Good Posting.
Rajesh
Asian Innovation at http://www.samooha.com
Too many forks and the reinventing-the-wheel phenomenon is the reason behind this. However, as someone pointed out to me, some Distros which are application specific like KnoMyth, GamesKnoppix, etc. are actually good solutions to everything-in-one Distros. The development of such Distros should be encouraged.