In case you have read our articles, you know that I’ve been doing plenty of distro hopping recently. The freedom of choice is one thing that Linux fans often boast about – you can choose in between hundreds of Linux distributions, a number of desktop environments and so on. Initially this freedom seems appealing and interesting, but after a number of hops from a distro to another I have started wondering about the meaningfulness of the huge variety of distributions. And then I happened to read an article at the Linux Hater’s Blog, who makes an interesting statement:“This “choice”, as loudly as it is trumpeted, is a key reason that Linux has not made it on the desktop.” - and he is damn right about it!

The website DistroWatch.com currently lists 570 Linux distributions in their database. A majority of distros are something that you or I have never heard of, while the top of their list features corporate backed Linux distributions like Ubuntu, openSUSE, RedHat and Mandriva, but also some smaller spin-off projects such as the PCLinuxOS (my current favorite) and LinuxMint. But as we go down the list I really have to wonder what do we need all these distributions for? Do they actually contribute something for the common good? Last time I checked it was the mega distributions contributing most to the up-stream. Due to the enormous number of distributions the talent and effort needed for developing free and open-source software is fragmented, and inefficiently utilized.

And the excess freedom of choice is not limited in the distributions itself, obviously, and it actually gets even crazier under the hood. Why does every distro want to introduce their own package management system? Based on my experience the Synaptic / apt-get damn right works. RPM-based distributions on the other hand love to use their own package managements. OpenSUSE’s old ZMD plain right sucked, so they decided to make a new one called Zypper. Zyp sucks less, but still seems to be outperformed by apt-get (atleast in terms of performance). At the same time Mandriva is using their own urpmi, which has worked nice and fast for me. RedHat of course has their own package management as well – why there is no joint effort in between these RPM based distributions? I read somewhere that Conary (Foresight Linux) would be somehow revolutionary – all exceptional I found in Conary was the amazingly slow system updates. And if we go outside the package management and discuss the configuration features that the dsitros offer, it doesn’t make much more sense. Various ‘Control Panel’ -kind of graphical configuration interfaces also seem to be something that every distribution has to make them selves. Mandriva has the excellent Control Center, while openSUSE’s YaST is extremely powerful, so why they arenot utilizied by other distros?

And I don’t even want to start about the various desktop environments. KDE (3.5x) is the better desktop, and no doubt about that, but thanks to this awesome freedom of choice the killer applications seem to coming from the GTK/Gnome neighborhood, so I am either stuck with the Gnome desktop or running GTK apps on my KDE desktop.

Lets jump back to the distributions and talk more about these ‘one man shows’ that are common, but also perhaps a dying breed in the Linux world. It seems that every now and then a talented developer decides to start his own distribution. And with any luck and hard effor he may actually succeed in building a very good one, which typically gathers a small but fanatic crowd of users. The problem however is that these ‘one man shows’ tend to be developed behind closed doors, and problems arise when the one man army runs out of human resource. Mepis is an great example – several excellent releases but now the project is quickly going downhill as the developer was forced to re-enter working life. At least in Mepis they are trying to increase community involvement. PCLinuxOS, a wonderful distribution. However, just a while ago an upgrade to Pidgin upgrade was required in order to continue using the ICQ instant messaging network – I have not yet seen the updated package for PCLOS, and neither can I make one myself. The developer(s) of PCLOS have done amazing job in forking Mandriva and providing the rolling update model, but at some point the resources are going to give in and cause issues.

The total freedom of choice is a problem and the Linux bandwagon is being pulled to various directions. Unfortunately the average user does not want choices – he want’s a reliable system that “just works”. Linux Hater’s makes an excellent comparison to the web server world, where Linux is de facto standard, due to the fact that the choice almost exclusively is the so called LAMP environment – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. Nobody seems to want an alternative to Apache, MySQL and PHP because these things just work! Why cant we have a LAMP for the desktop? Should we all just shut up and use Ubuntu’s long term supported release to for the common good?

More about ‘choice’: There is plenty to be found via Google