[ale] What divides Linux Distros?

[Leam Hall]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 4:33 PM Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 5 Feb 2021 13:50:43 -0500
> Leam Hall via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
> > Besides some of us not liking systemd, is there a real reason for so
> > many Linux distros? Outside of "because we can", I mean.
> >
> > Not putting anyone down, I just wonder what would happen if we joined
> > efforts a bit more.
> >
> > Leam
>
> I wrote a big, detailed answer, but here's a simpler one. As I
> remember, in 1999 we had a choice of Slackware, Red Hat, Corel,
> Caldera, and Debian. If those were my sole choices today, I'd hold my
> nose and buy a Mac.
>
> SteveT

I enjoyed your longer piece as well. But back in 1999 we also had OS/2
Warp, SCO POS, Solaris and HP/UX desktops, a few BSDs, NetWare,
RISCOS, and viable DOS machines. Red Hat, despite what we may think of
current corporate policies and ownership, was the biggest lever to get
Linux into the US enterprise datacenter. So we do own them that.

In your longer response, a lot if the differences seemed to revolve
around package management. Likely a "--not-if-deps" flag, or similar,
could be added to yum/dnf/xbps/apt, to provide the Slackware style
dependency avoidance. I've walked in "rpm hell" and have yet to get a
good Ubuntu answer for forcing a package removal when "dpkg --purge
--force-all" doesn't seem to work. We could probably add a
"--compile-all" option to replicate Gentoo.   :)

Rolling versus stable can be done in the same code base, can't it?
Window managers, especially given the accessibility issues that have
been brought up recently, seems like another place where smart people
could come up with a general solution.

The loss to the community is advancement from combined efforts. Think
about how much time is lost replicating the non-key differences in a
distro just to enable those things that you want. If your focus is on
X, you still need to deal with A through W to get X done. I really
wonder how things would look if we worked together more.

Leam