Like I said before, the distro's are 99% identical once you understand the system. I believe most of them were conceived for one of two reasons:Originally Posted by lpaulgib
1) some bunch of reasonably curious and capable people thot it would be an interesting and beneficial pastime
2) politics within the community WRT what the platform "is about"
Anyway, glad you weren't upset by my last screedI'm perhaps in a minority of linux users in believing that it will be bad for it in the long run to "popularize" itself too much. I think it already has a robust and sustainable user base and that people will continue to be attracted to it in the future just like they were in the past. There is no need to try and pitch it or attract even more people. Like I said, there are no shareholders who will benefit, it's not a stock you can purchase, so achieving a greater market share is just a macho goal.
I think the problems you think might be corrected by attending to such a goal are not really problems with the system, they are just because you are new to it. This is not to say that there are no problems. Consider that "linux" of course refers to the kernel and the history of linux kernel development is unprecedented. But the issues there have very little to do with ease of use desktop-y issues, and which distro does what how. In reality, it's those things that have made the platform the success that it is. The desktop is just a side show.
I've said this here before a few times. Well, I might recommend it to someone in particular, but in general, no way. I have friends who have windows computers at home and the whole family uses them and such and I'd be nuts to think I'd be doing them a favor by recommending they switch to linux.
They forked into fedora, which is more or less the same thing, and kept the brandname for Redhat, which the money you pay is for support. It's for businesses, servers, that kind of stuff. They haven't really jumped any boats. Redhat is still (by necessity) all GPL licensed software, so there is nothing illegal about "pirating" it. Then you get no support, of course, which might be hassle if you are running a commercial server and cannot afford me(actually you could probably afford me, but get the picture). This is what "not free as in beer means". Recently GNU and the FSF have dropped the term "open source" and gone with the more specific "free software". Sometimes the term "libre" is used because I believe in the romance languages there are two words for "free", with slightly different connotations. One of them is where we get liberated. So free as in "out of jail" and not necessarily "cost $0". The jail here AFAICT has to do with intellectual property laws, which GNU is dead set against particularly as it has come to be applied to software. The goal nothing has whether or not a distro wants to charge money. That's totally permissible.
As an analogy, think what would happen if musicians had to actually perform instead of just collecting royalties, because all their recorded material was freely reproducible under law. Would fewer musicians become multi-millionaires for little or no reason? Yes. It would be very hard to make all that money if you actually had to work for it. Would the quality of music (not it's stock market value) in general be better? Almost certainly, because only people who really wanted to work as performing musicians would stick it out.
If only someone had the gumption and foresight to foresee what pure greed would do to "the entertainment industry", we'd probably be living in a much more interesting world. So thank the universe for GNU/linux! Alternative philosophies.
I "need" my 411 script and phone-book file (ala 