On 8/8/06, Donn <donn.ingle@...400...> wrote:
I always felt that the singularity of Windows was it's real strength. I have had to work hard on my perceptions to try and see Linux's variations as a strength.
Well that's a pretty common response :) The truth is IMHO a bit more subtle, though this is rather offtopic hopefully the Inkscape devs will indulge us!
There's a lot of value in being 100% compatible, but comparitively little value in being 95% compatible. DJB said this, not me, but it's true so I'll repeat it anyway. Right now Linux distros are all 95% compatible, which causes things to explode messily every so often, and instead of fixing it people just write it off by saying "well that's the price of freedom".
Freedom is powerful but should be used responsibly. A lot of the differences that autopackage and autoconf (configure scripts) abstract don't give a competitive edge or advantages for the user. They're different simply through being apart. This sort of thing destroys a lot of value of compatibility with no corresponding increase in innovation, diversity or freedom.
So right now the variations aren't a strength, they're a weakness. Differences as strength are things like SUSE patching the old GTK file picker to suck less - preserving the compatibility whilst adding useful end user features. Differences as strength are things like Ubuntu using sudo instead of su (badly needed I say).
Differences as weakness are DocBook XSL being in /usr/share/xml in some distros, /usr/share/docbook in others, and /usr/share/stylesheets/docbook in a few random distros hardly anyone uses. It's things like some distros whacking symvers on libpng and others not. When this happens we lose.
thanks -mike