There Should Be Only One Distribution!

I often read about there being yet another distribution, how they’re not needed, and of course, based on Ubuntu. At DistroWatch.com people have even told Ladislav Bodnar the site’s creator/owner that he shouldn’t allow all of these derivatives and have a stricter criteria for distributions listed at his site, on the waiting list or not. The last part I personally find insulting of people, telling someone how to do something that they pretty well pioneered that nobody had ever done on such a level before.

There’s a couple different groups of people that usually talk about this. What’s the first group’s biggest and pretty well only reason for this  belief of too many distributions in our community? ‘It confuses new converts from other operating systems.’

What a pile of crap eh?

What the person is really saying is, they don’t like the distribution, or maybe just Ubuntu and its popularity, and want to be vocal about it. Know what I do when I don’t like something? I don’t use it. There’s a whole pile of stuff in our community that I don’t like, and I rarely, if ever, talk about it. I don’t believe in using Adobe’s Flash, I could go on and on about it when people bring it up, I don’t. I do my thing and move on. Not so with the type of person I mentioned, they’ll bring it up about each and every new derivative of almost every distribution.

Here’s the funny part too, if they like some derivative of a specific distribution that they already like then it’s perfectly fine.

Let’s speak about the other group, the smaller group that feels we really do have too many distributions and actually makes an attempt at explaining why they believe having fewer  would be better. They will tell you a number of reasons, all fairly sound from the onset, until you start to discuss them. Here’s the majority of the reasons:

• The same as the first group, it makes it confusing for new users.

• With too many distributions the larger distributions lose out on having an even larger community which will draw more people from that community as contributors in some fashion.
• Similar to the last one, a larger community means that OEMs will take notice and seriously consider shipping their systems with one of the distributions installed on them.
• The final reason is also similar, but only barely. If there were fewer distributions hardware manufacturers wouldn’t find it as confusing and would more readily consider building and packaging drivers for the community.

The first one is easy to deal with. As I’ve stated in another blog post if a new user is competent enough to even know about alternative operating systems, let alone able to install them, then I’m sure the number of distributions, and what specific category they represent will be more than understandable to them. I can’t repeat that simple concept enough.

Let’s use Slackware for the second one since it’s the oldest active distribution. If numbers increased contributors/developers then I’d imagine Slackware would be overflowing with developers after all these years. I wouldn’t even want to guess at a ratio of users turned contributors, as opposed to those that remained as just users. I’m sure the number is fairly low though. Also, you’ll find that most people that contribute have intended to from the onset. Not all of course, but most. A lot of them being students, or people already working in the field.

With the third it’s true to a degree only, then it stops being valid. Large OEMs do notice main distributions, they will ship their systems with a distribution installed. They will barely, if at all, advertise them though. Also, it will usually be some enterprise based system. We’ve all heard that OEMs have agreements to ship other operating systems, most are not about to break that agreement. They also look at markets. If we have one thousand distributions, or just one, it doesn’t make any difference, we still have the same amount of people using it.

The fourth, well. Drivers get built for the kernel. A hardware manufacturer doesn’t have to deal with a multitude of distributions to build their driver for the kernel. There’s not a lot to say about this, it’s all done at one place, for one thing, the kernel. Then the packaging format is fairly simple, we’ve had one standard package format for a very long time, it’s called a tarball. If someone doesn’t know how to build from source, then I’m quite sure an actual contributor to the project does, and most likely has built the package into a binary format compatible to that distribution. No, drivers and packaging are not an issue at all.

Instead of giving reasons on why we shouldn’t have so many distributions, we should be saying the exact opposite! We need more distributions. We need more derivatives.

Why? Easy, it’s what makes the community tick, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t find a lot of distributions useful, nor needed. They do an important thing though, they add. Adding is very important to this community. When you add in another distribution you’re ensuring that the community has grown yet again. You’re seeing the work of another person to actually be able to figure out how to put it together. Even if they used some remaster script/tool, they got there, and they did it. How much you want to bet some of that spins off to other people? Or how much you want to bet they end up conferring with other projects/groups within the community? I wrote a review here about Crunchbang, I didn’t mention that they had an individual in their forums who took what he learned from the questions asked in the forums there to help them create Archbang. From a desire to build an Openbox derivative started with Ubuntu (that later became based on Debian), it helped inspire another distribution to be a derivative of Arch. Amazing no?

There’s more than enough reasons to explain why more options is better. I’ll list some of them:

• Diversity improves upon the base.
• More choices simply gives you more choices. That’s not redundant if you actually open your mind to it.
• You’re not locked in.
• Cultural needs can be met easily.
• Ideas can be explored.

I leave the list there, but the last one was the most important in my opinion, ‘Ideas can be explored’. When you’re part of a specific project you have specific goals, road maps, specific dates to do all these things. It’s quite ordered. Also, you have to work within the project. How many people didn’t like the position of the buttons on the windows in Ubuntu? They’re still there too, aren’t they? That’s a key issue here. Even if a project had the next major leader (though unknown) in our community contributing to that project and working hard in their own spare time to develop the next greatest innovation, the project could very easily never accept it for its own reasons. Where would that person, their amazing idea(s), and this community be if the rule was, ‘no extra distributions, period’? Ideas are important, very important. Limit growth and you limit everyone’s options. Simple.

One other thing I’d like to point out, while we view the amount of distributions confusing, how many different cars, trucks, and vans are there in the world’s markets? Think about that, because that’s the reality here, ‘the world market’. You’re not just looking at our community from your own country, it spans the world. A lot of people don’t really grasp that aspect of it all, they’ll believe they do, but they don’t really, it’s world-wide.

Again, I may not like some of the distributions and wonder why they’ve been created. Someone else might like them though, and understand why they were developed. I know I’ve found a number of features from other distributions that I’ve either used or expanded on for my own personal builds and testing out ideas I’ve had.

So, I’m glad all the eggs are not in one basket.

Keep your stick on the ice…

Landor