Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 04:38:27 PM Les Mikesell wrote:
>> But the hardest part is that these things are application specific and
>> there is no standardization for locations where applications do
>> things. In fact, distributions intentionally move those locations
>> around in their packaging.
<snip>
>> Yeah, the whole idea seems like what a car company would have to do to
>> come back after selling a model that gets a lot of publicity for
>> crashing and burning. The earlier opinions weren't wrong, after all.
>
> You have the wrong analogy. Linux today is in a state quite similar to
> the state of the automotive industry before Henry Ford. Every car was
> unique, parts didn't interchange, roads were a mess, and people as
> hobbyists/enthusiasts built their oen cars (not from kit parts like most
> of today's auto enthusiasts) from scratch. Or the days of airplanes prior
> to World War I. Things did crash and burn, and it was an enthusiast's
> world.
<snip>
I'll have to disagree, Lamar. There *are* large distros: RH & its
derivatives, SuSE, and Debian & its derivatives (i.e., Ubuntu), and though
there are kit distros (fedora?), they're more like the Big Three
automakers of the US, and I can't think of frequent crash&burn reports.
Std. hardware, it all just works, usually. Now, there *are* more hardware
problems than, say, the imitation o/s out of Redmond, but that's because
all versions of *Nix use the hardware far more effectively than that does.
mark