Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Apr 2009 22:32 UTC
According to Canonical head honcho Mark Shuttleworth, Windows 7 presents the ideal opportunity for Linux to gain significant inroads into the desktop market. He said so in an interview with InternetNews. While I certainly do hope so, an eerie sense of deja vu creeps up on me: isn't this like the 923298th opportunity where Linux is supposed to make inroads into the desktop market?
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Member since:
2005-07-01
Ubuntu already has all that. Linux never will. It's the nature of the beast. Linux is the source code for a multi-platform kernel used in servers and embedded systems as well as desktops. It has no package manager and no desktop of any kind.
What we all recognize you mean is that the big Linux distros - Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, etc. - should unify on these things. And, of course, it's politics more than technology that prevents that. But that will never change.
That said, the LSB has given us universal binaries for those very platforms. And "package management" is only needed for OS components. Most stuff can just be installed to a subdirectory of /opt, with maybe a symlink in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.
Firefox, Adobe Flash and a whole list of other applications (that I get fed up with repeating) all get by just fine with a single .tar.gz binary distribution for all flavours of Linux. I don't think the problem is as bad as you paint it.