22 May
2009
22 May
'09
9:13 p.m.
Paul Davis wrote:
Its not politics. Its the lack of politics. There are no leaders with
any power to enforce any decisions. There is no police authority to
identify people who fail to comply with "joint decisions". There is no
justice system to punish or expel those who do. This is an anarchistic
meritocracy, and yes, its harder to get system infrastructure
developed in this environment than in a system like windows or OS X
where a single person can say "it shall be thus". thats good, and its
bad.
This actually paints quite a good picture of the situation since the truth may be worse.
The lack of a single leadership to direct developments is that Linux has become
unbelievably segmented to the point where it is no longer a single operating system - it
is several tens of them. They all position themselves under the same umbrella but the
feature sets, libraries, maintenance capabilities are very, very diverse to the point
where the only commonality is the name.
As Paul says, roughly, its anarchy. If you like that then work with it but don't
expect things to be easy for a long time, if ever. If you like it then accept having your
computer right on the edge of stability since you will be mixing applications/drivers that
work on one distribution and 'almost' work on another and some of these have to
work together which is a very big demand/expectation. If you don't like that idea then
there are other operating systems available, just put your money on the table. Life is
full of choices and what goes into and out of your wallet is one of them but don't
expect any of those choices to be correct. If it were that simple there would only be a
single OS and it would probably not be called something as generic as Linux for the simple
reason that Linux is no longer 'one' OS.
Regards, and power to your debuging tools.
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