| A Linux desktop fairy tale |
by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Mar. 21, 2006)
Once upon a time, long long ago, everyone who was anyone in the Kingdom of Linux used SlackWare. Then, along came Red Hat, which many people in the kingdom thought was neater and had a great package manager.
So, all the followers of the Great Penguin placed Red fedoras upon their heads and they were happy.
Still others said, "We do not need to wear a Red Hats! We will come together as a people and make a new Linux and we will call it Debian."
Others said, "We prefer green lizards and we shall call our distribution SuSE."
And lo, it was so.
Alas, those who wore Red Hats and those who did not disputed among themselves as to which of their Linuxes was the best, and their arguments filled the land with sorrow.
But then, people thought Red Hat was getting too full of itself and too much like the Evil Empire of the Northwest. "We shall go another way," some said, and so they did.
Far from the principalities of Finland and America, but not so far from the land of the lizard (the principality known as Germany), yet another distribution arose in the Kingdom of Linux, and it was called Mandrake.
And the disputes still raged, but many agreed that Mandrake, SuSE, and Debian were far better than that oh-so-popular Red Hat. But, then -- oh the horror of it all -- the Red Hat leaders said we will no longer make a retail version of Red Hat. "Traitors!" cried the people. "How dare you put making a profit ahead of being techno-geeky cool!"
But the Debians and the Mandrakians simply smiled to themselves. "Now, all will see that we are the coolest of the cool," they thought.
But, those of Mandrake lost money hand over fist, and francs over euros, and the founders even fought among themselves. And lo, the Mandrakians, now called Mandrivans were filled with woe.
Meanwhile, the Debians joined forces and said, "We will make the best of the best of the best of Linux, and the Great Penguin will smile upon us."
And they met, and they met, and they met, and they met... until some began to ask, "Are we ever going to see Sarge!?" Finally, the great Sarge arrived, but by then, some of the Debian faithful had said, "We shall meet no more. We shall still be socially conscious, but we shall release a new distribution which shall be called Ubuntu every six months without fail, and we shall be the best in the land!"
And, lo, the inhabitants of Ubuntu said, "Truly this is the most wonderful Linux of all. See! Even the small principality of MEPIS has left the Debians behind, and has joined us! Hurrah!"
"Oh, and we shall not speak of the six-week delay to our six-month schedule for the great Dapper Drake, for ye... ah... well, it's just not ready yet OK? OK!" . . .
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(cut to reality)
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. . . OK, so that's not the real history of Linux distributions, but in some ways it's pretty darn close. From the very beginning, there's been a tendency to see one Linux distribution as being cooler than another and, in turn, to fight over which distribution is the best.
Now, make no mistake about it, there are real differences between the distributions. I think, though, that we spend far too much time arguing over who's cooler than who, instead of doing tangible things to actually improve the state of desktop Linux.
That's one reason why I hope the LSB (Linux Standard Base) and the Portland Project will make all of our arguments moot, regarding which Linux is best.
We need all the Linuxes to run on the same hardware and run the same applications. It's only by getting all the distributions on the same platform and program pages that we'll be able to convince more people to use Linux.
We in the Linux community have a big opportunity coming up to do just that, thanks to the forthcoming release of Microsoft Vista. As Jack Messman, CEO of Novell, told me earlier today, "We don't see Vista as being a migration; it's a conversion, an expensive conversion. Linux can capture a fair share of the desktop business."
He's right.
Novell is trying to get a larger share of the business desktop with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Gaining more of the desktop for Linux, though, is a goal that all the Linux distributions need to work together to reach.
To do that, instead of emphasizing the differences between the distributions, which only serves to confuse non-Linux users, Linux fans need to work on getting people to see the common core values among all Linuxes.
If the developers do their job, and the loyal users do their best, then perhaps the Linux desktop fairy tale will have a happy ending, with millions upon millions of new users.
The End
 About the author: Ziff Davis Internet editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the
way.
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