Les Mikesell wrote:
Casey Dahlin wrote:
I don't really agree with your expectations of Linux as a whole.
This idea has come about that there is an operating system called
Linux and there are many flavors of it called distros. This is not,
IMHO, the case. There are many different operating systems, and they
all happen to use the Linux kernel.
Maybe you don't remember it, but there was a time when there actually
were a lot of different operating systems in use, and they had really
annoying arbitrary differences. Fortunately most of them died and the
ones that continued converged on some standards. Different Linux
distributions are not different operating systems and they certainly
can't claim to be that and at the same time have a mantra of 'upstream'.
I'd say I can count on one hand the number of distros that aren't
niche-only or effectively "living dead." We have the best of both
worlds. Lots of OSes, but nobody cares about most of them so its all good :)
If somehow I could be transported 30 years into the future, and I
could be sat down in front of Fedora, I'd be honestly disappointed if
I recognized it.
You are imagining the wrong scenario. I'd like to avoid having to deal
with all of the silly and meaningless changes that break things for
the next 30 years too, but that's not going to happen. The real world
situation is that people have large and complex systems built around
existing OS behavior whether formally standardized or just inherited
from SysV that will break with program interface and device name
changes, and there are large numbers of people to retrain for every
user interface change. Now, plan your next 30 years in the context of
keeping things working through them instead of being magically
transported past everything that breaks. If you need to imagine
something, imagine that your bank and credit card accounts are
maintained on the OS you design and that the customer service people
you call are trying to guess the latest user interface changes as they
try to help you.
My bank had better be running RHEL, which is kept frozen in time for
precisely this reason. Fedora should be about doing it /right/,
regardless of how we did it yesterday. Keep in mind, the OS /is/ free.
--CJD
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