Re: your mail

[George Bonser <grep@shorelink.com>]

On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, fockface dickmeat wrote:

> I think debian can disappear, if it doesn't have a real percentage of 
> enduser desktops. Anyone who ignores enduser desktops is setting debian 
> up for a rerun of Apple Incorporated. So many experts consider
> endusers as stupid worthless people, but everyone starts out as one.
> Hand them a Windows2000/MSN box,  a Sun Netbox or a WebTV and they 
> probably will just point and click for the rest of their lives. If 
> instead they got a fully configured (Debian) Linux box, which they could 
> tinker on, with lots of useful help files, and pointers to info and 
> decent books then they could find out how cool computers can really be.
> 
> 
> If linux and debian is going to be anything other than a minor niche OS, 
> then it must gain a share of the desktop market. See BeOS, see MacOS, 
> see OS/2 etc.....
> 

Maybe linux will become the dot in .com ... who knows.  What I do know is
this:

Anyone targeting their software for Red Hat is dumb because you have just
locked yourself out of 50% of the market. You need tools that span all
distro's that allow you to install your software properly.  All distros
need something like the Debian update-rc.d script so that init scripts can
be installed without knowing the /etc filesystem layout.

Every single distro of Linux has different UID/GID assignments making it
impossible to share things via NIS and NFS between them easily. There
needs to be a set standard so software can install on ANY brand of Linux
and so that different Linux distro's can operate on the same network.
Currently, the different brands might as well be different operating
systems.

THAT is what is going to kill Linux ... forget the desktop, they need a
consistant system interface to avoid the Unix problem.