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It's such a pain when you don't know what distribution to choose. It's such a waste of time and effort for developers to port stuff from one distribution to another. It makes Linux/Unix more complicated (and scary) than it should be.

While I know there are certain reasons why the situation became the way it is now, I wonder if anyone has ever thought of reunifying the worlds of Linux and other (free) Unix? This is still a question: Have there been any (failed) attempts to unify Linux/Unix?

phunehehe
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If you would unify the distributions system configuration tools and general behavior there would be no need for different distributions.

An advantage would be to define some binary interface for the applications. The The Linux Standard Base Workgroup tries to define some.

Here is a list of the specifications which are the base of some iso standards: LSB Specs

echox
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There was United Linux , which attempted to crete a baseline for linux distros.

nos
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In addition to what echox said.

Any attempt is an exercise in futility. Truthfully? I don't want to run my Desktop the way I run a Server, and the way I run my desktop, rolling bleeding edge, would not be good for everyone.

What we can and should do is attempt to minify the differences. I think things like the freedesktop notification API and Systray API which are now a pseudo standard (I think) is a good thing. The more we make things like that which takes duplication away from the dev's the better. Poppler is a good example of an app with a lot of split effort being pulled into one effort, now any app that needs to render pdf's has a good library to use on all platforms.

In short we should all try to share as much code an API's as possible instead of creating a new library every time we want to do something.

( Will someone create a standard api to access the 'system password manager' already (be that kwallet or whatever ) )

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xenoterracide
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  • great point about minifying, at some point there should be a universal package format that can be installed on all distributions – phunehehe Sep 05 '10 at 15:59
  • @phunehehe I've yet to see distro's that don't have ways of handling rpm's and tar.gz's. – xenoterracide Sep 05 '10 at 16:10
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    http://sta.li/ - It is GNU/Linux but I find they ideas... well... how to say it... – Maja Piechotka Sep 05 '10 at 17:47
  • @phunehehe: i think that is Makefile – uray Sep 06 '10 at 11:20
  • "In short we should all try to share as much code an API's as possible instead of creating a new library every time we want to do something." Personally, I think the distinction should be made. You can use the same API but have different libraries/implementations of it, and that's fine, because that allows integration without forcing uniformity. – André Paramés Jan 04 '11 at 13:55
  • @andre well I'm not saying that's all bad either ;) just that I hate it when we have 5 mediocre different implementations of the same concept with no shared API, when we could have 1 movement that got it done. See Poppler vs libpurple, libmsn, kopete, etc. – xenoterracide Jan 04 '11 at 14:04
  • @xenoterracide: Poppler? The PDF rendering library ??? – J. M. Becker Apr 20 '12 at 04:34
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Well, when you said Linux you are only referring to the kernel. A distro itself is composed of many GNU tool/apps and other applications, and that makes it hard to make them unified as every developer or user has their own tastes and preferences, and that makes Linux distros vary. But the kernel itself is more or less quite unified.

As for unification or standardization itself, there are bunch of efforts such as Linux standard base and Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

tshepang
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uray
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  • still, you are supposed to "build" the software specifically for each distro (unless they use the same kind of package). apps are not much of a problem because, say, on Slackware I can install an app from Ubuntu, right? – phunehehe Sep 05 '10 at 15:54
  • I'm tempted to vote down over the (well it practically is), "It's GNU/Linux, not just Linux", statement. I use KDE, X.org, and Zsh which are not made by GNU. sure I have to have Bash installed (cause my distro requires it) but it's not my interactive shell. If I had an alternative to GNU Coreutils I might install those too. Really how much of my system is GNU? – xenoterracide Sep 05 '10 at 16:14
  • How much of your system wasn't compiled by GCC? :) But I think the distinction is mostly valid when you're talking about the libc. Android, for example, uses a different implementation, hence it isn't GNU/Linux. – André Paramés Jan 04 '11 at 13:51
  • @andre I'm sure not much wasn't compiled by gcc, and I do believe we use glibc. but I don't think 2-4 of the 1000 packages I have installed require me to say GNU/Linux. – xenoterracide Jan 05 '11 at 01:33
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    @xenoterracide: I think their position is that the GNU packages (and let's not forget the GNU GPL license, under which the kernel is developed, and that for good or bad has shaped the Linux project) are the indispensable core to build and boot any distributions, while the rest sits on top but it's not really part of the OS. Having said that, I never actually call it GNU/Linux unless I'm referring also to "other" Linuxes (android, webos, etc). – André Paramés Jan 06 '11 at 00:22
  • @xenoterracide: you mean "vote" down, right? Or what is "mod down" supposed to mean? – Jürgen A. Erhard Feb 02 '11 at 14:01
  • @jae yes I would say I did mean that... sorry I wasn't a moderator then... and so I doubt it was as ambiguous when I said it. I've modified it. – xenoterracide Feb 03 '11 at 10:44
  • Personally I always use 'GNU/Linux', whenever I remember and especially in writing. For the reasons already mentioned, most relevant Android. But 2-4 packages??? You must be kidding, I've got more if you ONLY count releases from the GNU org. When you throw in GNU GPL licensed, way more then half. – J. M. Becker Apr 20 '12 at 04:40
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Just try and tell the OpenBSD crowd that they need to conform and be more open and see how that goes.

Each distro accomplishes a different task and does it well, if they don't then they have no business being in existance. Distros that add something to the community should not be forced into a single release, it would make for a massive clash of ideologies if nothing else. Nothing would ever get done.

This is like saying Windows and Mac should merge. Two COMPLETELY different philosophies and methods of doing things.

baweaver
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