On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 1:50 AM, Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com> wrote:
> Exactly true. Its more like the analogy of cars. Some people
prefer
> Ford, some Chevrolet, others like Mercedes-Benz better, but ultimately
> they all have an engine that runs on fuel.
A better analogy that involves cars needs some additional detail:
Different automakers put the driver's seat in different locations. Mercedes right
front, Ford right rear, Chevy on the luggage rack, Jaguar in the trunk, etc.
Yeah, that's why different Linux -- Gentoo, Fedora, Slackware,
openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc...
And I say that because package management is a viciously nasty user
experience. Once you've committed to learning one of them, you definitely don't
want to learn how to use another one - assuming, you know, you actually have work to do
rather than just screwing around with computers all day long, learning mindnumbing
estoteric b.s like package managers.
And fuel in this analogy, is the linux kernel. The only thing they
have in common is the kernel, which by all rights end users should be the least interested
in or interact with.
I would rather gut myself than learn another package management
system, even if I had the time. I just want a little icon to click on and maybe a button
that says Install, because I actually care to spend time using the application I've
gone to the effort to locate, rather than figuring out how to install, remove, or update
it.
I wonder how many thousands of man hours are consumed maintaining the
different packaging systems, and manually dealing with dependency conflict resolution. It
must be insane.
I wonder even the life is short to learn so much types of things in
Linux! Great!!