As far as the second group (Mr. & Mrs. 2.5 kids) are concerned they want application choice, not OS choice, and application won’t happen until the OS choice is made and this drives non-techies crazy.

What’s wrong with this:
1) a standard base Linux
2) a flexible GUI that can have either a full featured KDE look-and-feel or a stream-lined Gnome or XFCE look-and-feel? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of themes? Just get over the religious wars here, create a good infrastructure for GUIs that combines the “real benefits” of these GUIs, make sure applications don’t have to care either way about which theme is being used, and get on with your lives.
3) combine the best features of Synaptic/apt-get/Zypper/DEB/one-click, etc. I think each distro team should care more about developing something that will make their distro perhaps more attractive than others on some level, but not at the expense of compatibility.

We need a single desktop distro, 2-3 enterprise distros, and the rest can simply play with these to their hearts content. The best new stuff gets incorporated into the standard and the techies can continue innovating all they want.

You are a total idiot. Sorry, but that’s the true.

But… Linux is a trash.

Sorry, but is the true!

I certainly am not trying to shift this topic towards a theology discussion. But since the scope of your arguments remain within mere opinion, I simply gave mine- That God indeed exists and OSS is a manifestation of divine intervention.

As for YaST being much more than apt-get, well, that’s your opinion. As for my own personal experience, apt-get gets the job done with flying colors; Yast is O.K. but you should backup your claims with (technical) facts if you want to convince anyone that it’s better.

YaST is much more than APT. Zypper is the package management of openSUSE and actually has features beyond APT.

And come back to me about the God stuff when he has written a few lines of code and/or his mere existense is proven.

I really believe that God himself has blessed the OSS community to develop superior technological systems for the benefit of humankind and counteract the “Evil Empire” and its efforts to take over the universe.

Ubuntu means “Humanity”

Google’s corporate motto is “Do no evil”

That’s enough evidence for me.

I strongly disagree that there is “a lot work” to be done in order to make Linux “suitable” for everyone:

1) Hardware- a non issue since Linux runs in more hardware (including embedded applications) than XP or that joke, Vista. Even Dell is now pre-installing Ubutnu.

2) Usability and the Desktop are just fine by me. I find that KDE is so much better to understand and navigate than Vista or OSX.

3) Applications have definitely matured to a high grade. GIMP is excellent and has all the features of a professional-grade application, that you found it confusing is because you did not buy the book (Try Beginning GIMP, by Akkana Peck, Apress). Which brings me to point 4.

4) Everything that you are debating is mere opinion on your part. For instance, many people, including myself, believe that apt-get is superior than YAST: It works all of the time, is much faster, and much easier to use. (Yes, I have used both).

Your last thought- to combine Ubuntu, Suse, and Mandriva does not take into account that these are individual and autonomous companies with their respective OSS supporting communities (scattered throughout the universe).

You can’t say that Ferrari, Mercedes, and Toyota should all meld to create the ultimate racing hybrid, with all the features that you may want. It’s just not going to happen.

You need to understand how the Linux phenomena has succeeded in creating perfection: Natural selection. See, you have a community that focuses solely on the kernel and do not care about the desktop or applications. Then you have a community that focuses on the Desktop and nothing else. Finally, you have individual communities of developers pumping out applications.

For each of these communities, all of mankind is grateful/thankful for their dedication and genius in creating something truly astonishing: A way to run our computers.

There is still a lot of work to do in order to make Linux suitable for EVERYONE. Hardware compatibility is one thing, but of course there would the support of vendors be of great help. Usability & the desktop needs work and of course the lack of killer applications. Yes, some Linux applications can just about do what their Win / OSX counterparts can, but in too few cases the Linux counterpart is better. I always find GIMP confusing in comparison to Win alternatives PSP or PS.

There is good core, and there are some very good ingredients – the productization just isn’t ready yet. openSUSE is perhaps the best productized desktop out of the free distros? Ubuntu is the only one to affort to offer long term support. Ubuntu, as an example, would nicely benefit from YaST or Mandriva’s configuration tools. Ubuntu could also lend some visuals designer either from SUSE or Mandriva, as Ubu looks like crap in comparison to those.

As said, fragmentation, competing distros, talent lost to small/alternative distro developement that would be of great use in the mega distros, redundant work. Combine Ubuntu, openSUSE and Mandriva, picking only the best features, and then you have a damn fine distro at hand.

“Less overlapping and redundant effort, more and higher quality progress on the FOSS operating system, leading towards a system that anybody could use as a real alternative to Windows.”

I can somewhat agree on the fist couple of points, but the last part is a bit of nonsense: Linux, today, already is usable by anyone; moreover, it already is a REAL alternative to Windows.

Let’s not complaint that there are too many communities developing their own distro. The fact is that this is the democratic and free process that has created the best operating system ever. I don’t see how corralling everyone under a bureaucratic umbrella will improve innovation- or anything.